Pulitzer for drama also has Princeton roots.
By: Jeff Milgram
Paul Muldoon, the Irish-born, Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry Monday for his collection of poems, "Moy Sand and Gravel" (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $22).
And the Pulitzer for drama went to Nilo Cruz, a playwright who has a long association with McCarter Theatre.
Mr. Cruz’s Pulitzer-winning play, "Anna in the Tropics," will open McCarter’s new 360-seat Roger S. Berlind Theatre on Sept. 9.
While Mr. Muldoon was unavailable to comment, his boss, Edmund White, director of the Program in Creative Writing, was delighted.
"Isn’t that great," he said when he heard the news Monday afternoon.
"Paul Muldoon is an all-around man of letters who is as cultured as he is original," Mr. White said. "In his own verse, he has consistently explored the boundary between Irish and American speech. In fact, he is at his best when he is showing the friction between the two dialects of English."
Mr. Muldoon is no stranger to awards. He won the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 1997 Irish Times Literature Prize for poetry.
He studied first at St. Patrick’s College in Armagh and then at Queen’s University in Belfast.
Mr. Muldoon was a protégé of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
"New Weather," his first collection of poems, appeared in 1973, while Mr. Muldoon was still a student. Mr. Heaney described Mr. Muldoon as "the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years."
After leaving the university, Mr. Muldoon worked as a producer for the BBC in Belfast. In the mid-1980s he gave up that job to become a full-time writer. He left Ireland and moved to America, later becoming a citizen.
In 1990, he joined the Princeton faculty.
In related news, the American Theatre Critics Association presented Mr. Cruz with the prestigious ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award recently for "Anna in the Tropics." The award was presented in a ceremony at Actors Theatre of Louisville during the 27th annual Humana Festival of New Plays.
His play "Two Sisters and a Piano" had its world premiere at McCarter.