Paul Muldoon & Don Paterson
Please note that this event was due to feature Seamus Heaney.
'We are very sorry to hear that Seamus Heaney has died: the leading English-language poet of our time and its greatest advocate for poetry, Seamus was also a marvellous man, and a dear friend to many of us in Manchester - as he was to readers and writers across the world: ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.' - John McAuliffe
All current ticket holders will be entitled to a refund, from their place of purchase, if they no longer wish to attend the event, please contact the Martin Harris Centre Box Office on 0161 2758951.
TICKETS ALREADY PURCHASED FOR THIS EVENT ARE STILL VALID.
As part of the 3rd Contemporary British and Irish Poetry Conference, hosted this year by the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester, two of the world’s leading poets will read together.
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 and grew up in The Moy in Co Armagh. After attending Queens in Belfast, he worked for the BBC as a radio and tv producer and since then he has taken up various academic postings, mostly in the US, where he now lives, as an American citizen, teaching at Princeton where he is currently the Howard GB Clark Professor in the Humanities. His Collected Poems 1968-1998 (2001) was followed by Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) which won the Pulitzer prize, Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). His many other awards include the TS Eliot prize, the Shakespeare prize and the Irish Times Award. He also collaborates with composers and musicians and his lyrics have recently been collected in The Word on the Street (2013).
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963 and has worked in the School of English at the University of St Andrews since 2002, where he lectures full-time and holds the position of Professor of Poetry. His collections of poetry include Nil Nil (Faber, 1993), God’s Gift to Women (Faber, 1997), The Eyes (after Antonio Machado, Faber, 1999), Landing Light (Faber, 2003; Graywolf, 2004) and Rain (Faber, 2009; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. Most recently, Rain won the 2009 Forward prize: the book "has darkness and sorrow in it, but all is alleviated by his virtuoso spirit," wrote Richard Wilbur. "The poems sacrifice nothing to form, but are empowered by it”. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.
This event is part of the Manchester Literature Festival.