Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has approved the award of Her Majesty’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2017 to Irish poet Paul Muldoon. He becomes only the second Irish poet to be so honoured in the award’s 83-year history, after Michael Longley in 2001.
The Poetry Medal Committee recommended Muldoon as this year’s recipient of The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, on the basis of the body of his work. Summing up the committee’s choice, Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s poet laureate, 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. 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 was born in Co Armagh in 1951 and studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, before publishing his first collection of poetry in 1973, and working as a BBC producer in Belfast. In 1981 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has produced twelve major collections of poetry as well as books for children, song lyrics, opera libretti and works of criticism. He has lived chiefly in the United States for the last 30 years, teaching at Princeton University (since 1987) and editing the New Yorker’s poetry section (2007-17). His work has received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Muldoon was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999-2004.
Muldoon will be presented with the medal by Queen Elizabeth in 2018. The Gold Medal for Poetry was instituted by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then poet laureate, John Masefield. The medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, on the basis either of a body of work over several years, or for an outstanding poetry collection issued during the year of the award. The poet muast be from the UK or a Commonwealth country.
Previous recipients of The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry
1934 Laurence Whistler
1936 W H Auden
1940 Michael Thwaites
1952 Andrew Young
1953 Arthur Waley
1954 Ralph Hodgson
1955 Ruth Pitter
1956 Edmund Blunden
1957 Siegfried Sassoon
1959 Frances Cornford
1960 John Betjeman
1962 Christopher Fry
1963 William Plomer
1964 R S Thomas
1965 Philip Larkin
1967 Charles Causley
1968 Robert Graves
1969 Stevie Smith
1970 Roy Fuller
1971 Sir Stephen Spender
1973 John Heath-Stubbs
1981 D J Enright
1986 Norman MacCaig
1988 Derek Walcott
1989 Allen Curnow
1990 Sorley Maclean
1991 Judith Wright
1992 Kathleen Raine
1996 Peter Redgrove
1998 Les Murray
2000 Edwin Morgan
2001 Michael Longley
2002 Peter Porter
2003 U A Fanthorpe
2004 Hugo Williams
2006 Fleur Adcock
2007 James Fenton
2009 Don Paterson
2010 Gillian Clarke
2011 Jo Shapcott
2012 John Agard
2013 Douglas Dunn
2014 Imtiaz Dharker
2015 Liz Lochhead
2016 Gillian Allnutt
