Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951. He studied at Queen's University, Belfast, and has worked for BBC Belfast as a radio and television producer.

His most recent book of poetry is Selected Poems 1968–2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He is also the author of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), Maggot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Horse Latitudes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize, among others.

He has also written libretti for the operas Bandanna (1999) and Shining Brow (1993); the play Six Honest Serving Men (1995); and edited The Faber Book of Beasts (1997), The Essential Byron (1989), and The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986).

Muldoon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, the T. S. Eliot Award for The Annals of Chile in 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1996, and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for his New Selected Poems (Faber & Faber Poetry, 1996) in 1996. In 2003 he won the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry. In 2017 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. 

Muldoon has taught at a number of British and American universities including Cambridge University, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004 and is currently Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He lives in New York City and Sharon Springs, New York.