Wendy Cope Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, "Contact". Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for "The Spectator" magazine until 1990. Five collections of her adult poetry have been published, "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" in 1986, "Serious Concerns" in 1992, "If I Don't Know" in 2001, "Family Values" in 2011, and "Anecdotal Evidence" in 2018. She has also edited several anthologies of comic verse and was a judge of the 2007 Man Booker Prize. In 1998, she was voted the listeners' choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to
Wendy Cope succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate. When Andrew Motion's term as Poet Laureate came to an end in 2009, Cope was again widely considered a popular candidate, although she believes the post should be discontinued. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded Motion as Poet Laureate. Cope was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours. In April 2011, the British Library purchased Cope's archive including manuscripts, school reports and 40,000 emails, the largest email archive they have bought to date. The papers also includes 67 poetry notebooks and unpublished poems. Cope commented "I wanted to