The Northern Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, a professor at Princeton University in the US, has been elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Muldoon is the second Irishman in a decade to hold the chair, and also the second Ulsterman. He succeeds the English poet James Fenton, who succeeded the 1995 Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.
Born in Co Armagh in 1951, Muldoon is the winner of many prestigious literary prizes, including the TS Eliot Memorial Prize which he won for The Annals Of Chile 1994 and the 1997 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for poetry, for his critically acclaimed New Selected Poems - 1968-1994. Hay, his most recent collection, was published last October.