Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England. She won a scholarship to read English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, coming top of her year. She published her first collection of poetry, The Unlooked-for Season, in 1960, which went on to win the Eric Gregory Award. Joseph's most famous poem, 'Warning: When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple', first appeared in her 1974 collection Rose in the Afternoon. It has remained popular ever since and was voted Britain's favourite modern poem in a 2006 BBC poll. In 1995 Joseph won the Forward Prize for her poem 'In Honour of Love' and her experimental fiction work Persephone won the 1986 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. Jenny Joseph died in 2018, aged 85.