Mr Paul Muldoon has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The 51-year-old Northern-born poet won the US award for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel.
A former BBC radio and TV producer, he is now the director of the Creative Writing Programme at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he lives. He is also Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, England.
Mr Muldoon was born in Eglish, Co Armagh, and brought up near the Moy in Co Tyrone. His father was a gardener and mushroom farmer, his mother a schoolteacher. He began writing poetry at the age of 12 and Faber and Faber published his first collection of poems while he was still a student at Queen's University, Belfast.
For several years he was a radio producer for BBC Northern Ireland. He moved to the United States in 1987 and has held various teaching posts at the universities of Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He won the 1995 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for The Annals of Chile. In 1999, the poet was elected unopposed to the 300-year-old position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, becoming only the second Irishman to hold the post. The first was fellow Northerner, Mr Seamus Heaney, a former mentor of Mr Muldoon.
The Pulitzer Prize for biography was awarded to Robert Caro for Master of the Senate, the third volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson.
The Boston Globe newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for "courageous comprehensive coverage" in its disclosures of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic church.