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Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951, and brought up near the Moy - a village in an area called Collegelands. His mother Brigid was a schoolteacher and his father Patrick 'a labourer, and for some time a market gardener.' In the grammar school of St. Patrick's College in Armagh, teachers introduced him to Irish language and music, to T. S. Eliot and to The Faber Book of Modern Verse which he 'more or less learned off by heart.' At seventeen he started writing poetry, at first in Irish. When he came to Queen's University Belfast in 1969, he gave up writing in Irish because he felt he 'didn't have a real command of the language.' At Queen's, Seamus Heaney, whom he had met before and who had helped publish some of his poems, was his tutor. He joined him, Michael Longley, the critic Michael Allen, and other writers in weekly meetings where new poems were discussed. Among his fellow-students were Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson and Frank Ormsby. In 1973, while still at university, his first volume of poetry, New Weather, was published by Faber & Faber. In that year, he graduated from Queen's with a bachelor's degree in English literature and started to work at BBC Belfast where he had 'somehow wangled a job' as a radio and television producer. After the death of his father in 1985, he quit his job and moved to the USA a year later. He lives there with his wife the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz and their two children. He is Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University where, since 1990, he has also been the director of the Creative Writing Program. Paul Muldoon has been awarded the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1991, 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, most recently, the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for his New Selected Poems. He is president of the Poetry Society. In May 1999, he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford and -following James Fenton- is the 42nd poet to hold this honorary position which involves giving three lectures a year for a period of five years. http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/muldoon/muldoon.htm |