Paul Muldoon wins Queen’s gold medal for poetry 2017
Irish poet Paul Muldoon was named the winner of the Queen’s gold medal for poetry 2017.
The Northern Ireland-born writer has produced 12 major collections of poetry as well as children’s books and song lyrics, theguardian.com reported.
The Poet Laureate Dame Carol Ann Duffy said: “Paul Muldoon is widely acclaimed as the most original and influential poet of the past 50 years and is rightly celebrated alongside Seamus Heaney.
“His poetry displays a restless, playful brilliance, forever searching for new ways to channel his ideas and new language to dress them in.”
Muldoon was born in Portadown County, Armagh, in 1951 and published his first poetry collection in 1973. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981 and has lived chiefly in the US for the last 30 years, teaching at Princeton University and more recently editing poetry for the New Yorker magazine, which he gave up earlier this year.
Duffy added: “He is ambitious, erudite, witty and musical. He can experiment with form and stand tradition on its head, craft a tender elegy or intimate love poem with equal skill. His work is of major significance internationally – poetry of clarity, invention, purpose and importance which has raised the bar of what’s possible in poetry to new heights.”
Muldoon is the youngest of a group of poets from Northern Ireland, including Heaney and Michael Longley, centered around Queen’s University in Belfast, who gained prominence in the 1970s.