Through the prism of his own poems, Paul Muldoon will offer a brief survey of Irish history from earliest times to the present day. This illustrated lecture will feature poems on the Vikings, the Normans, the English, the Troubles of the second half of the 20th century, as well as more recent events in Ireland. 

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he taught at Princeton University for thirty-five years. He is the author of fifteen collections of poetry including Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, published by FSG and Faber and Faber in 2024. Among his awards are the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1980 Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 he was elected a Saoi of Aosdana, an Irish fellowship of artists.  

The Turnbull Lectures have run almost continually since 1891, and are always done on the topic of poetry. Over the history of the series, lectures have been given by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Jacques Derrida, W.S. Merwin, Helen Vendler, and many others. Recent lecturers have included Anne Carson, Natasha Trethewey, Robin Coste Lewis, Alice Oswald, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Plumly, Edward Mendelson, and Edna Longley.

Photo credit: Christine Harris