In partnership with the Consulate General of Ireland in New York.
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, playwright, lyricist, and translator.
After studying at Queen’s University, Belfast, he published his first book, New Weather in 1973, at the age of 21. From 1973 he worked as a producer for the BBC in Belfast until, in the mid-1980’s, he gave up his job to become a freelance writer. Muldoon is the author of fourteen full-length collections of poetry, including the most recent Howdie-Skelp (2021), Frolic and Detour (2019), and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). He has published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into twenty languages.
Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004 and as poetry editor of The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017. He has taught at Princeton University since 1987 and currently occupies the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities. He was the Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his awards are the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1980 Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Spirit of Ireland Award from the Irish Arts Center (NYC), the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from ten universities.