Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for 35years. He is the author of 15 collections of poetry including Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, published by FSG and Faber and Faber in 2024. 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, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for 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 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

WHY THEY’RE JOINING US

In the words of the Poetry Foundation, Paul Muldoon’s poems are “playful but serious, elusive but direct, innovative but traditional.” In addition to writing poetry, and winning many major awards in the process, Muldoon has written rock lyrics for Warren Zevon and collaborated with Paul McCartney in a five-year conversation that culminated in their book, The Lyrics; 1956 to the Present. This two-volume opus, which illuminates the stories behind many of McCartney’s song lyrics, confirmed Muldoon’s belief that poetry is “a very broad church” and “comes in a huge array of guises.”

Photo credit – Christine Harris