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From: "Jean Rice" <>
Subject: [IGW] No. Ireland Roots/Paul MULDOON Wins US Poetry Pulitzer
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 14:25:00 -0700

08/04/2003

Mr Paul Muldoon has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for
poetry. The 51-year-old Northern-born poet won the US award for his
collection Moy Sand and Gravel.

A former BBC radio and TV producer, he is now the director of the
Creative Writing Programme at Princeton University in New Jersey,
where he lives. He is also Professor of Poetry at Oxford
University, England.

Mr Muldoon was born in Eglish, Co Armagh, and brought up near the
Moy in Co Tyrone. His father was a gardener and mushroom farmer,
his mother a schoolteacher. He began writing poetry at the age of
12 and Faber and Faber published his first collection of poems
while he was still a student at Queen's University, Belfast.

For several years he was a radio producer for BBC Northern Ireland.
He moved to the United States in 1987 and has held various teaching
posts at the universities of Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley and the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He won the 1995 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for The Annals of Chile. In
1999, the poet was elected unopposed to the 300-year-old position
of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, becoming only the
second Irishman to hold the post. The first was fellow Northerner,
Mr Seamus Heaney, a former mentor of Mr Muldoon.

The Pulitzer Prize for biography was awarded to Robert Caro for
Master of the Senate, the third volume of his biography of Lyndon
Johnson.

The Boston Globe newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public
service for "courageous comprehensive coverage" in its disclosures
of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic church.

© The Irish Times

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• [IGW] No. Ireland Roots/Paul MULDOON Wins US Poetry Pulitzer by "Jean Rice" <>