Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951. He studied at Queen's University, Belfast, and has worked for BBC Belfast as a radio and television producer. His recent books of poetry include Poems 1968-1998 (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001), Birds (1999), Hay (1998), Hopewell Haiku (1997), The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt (1997), Kerry Slides (1996), New Selected Poems 1968-1994 (1996), The Annals of Chile (1994), Madoc: A Mystery (1991), and Meeting the British (1987). He has also written libretti for the operas Bandanna (1999) and Shining Brow (1993); the play Six Honest Serving Men (1995); and edited The Faber Book of Beasts (1997), The Essential Byron (1989), and The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986).

Muldoon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1991, the T. S. Eliot Award for The Annals of Chile in 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1996, and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for his New Selected Poems in 1996. Paul Muldoon has taught at a number of British and American universities including Cambridge University, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is currently Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.