Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, playwright, lyricist and translator. He published his first book, New Weather (Faber) 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 and moved to the United States with his second wife, the American novelist and MacDowell Fellow Jean Hanff Korelitz (89, 89). 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 is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, 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 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from 10 universities.
Portrait by Beowulf Sheehan