Poetry Club: Paul Muldoon & Special Guests

The Sonnet – A celebration, Featuring Alice Oswald and Don Paterson

Join Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, as well as special guests Alice Oswald and Don Paterson, as they read from a new anthology celebrating an ever-vital and enthralling verse form: the sonnet.

This autumn, Faber publishes Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets, edited by Paul Muldoon. This is an essential collection of beloved classics, hidden treasures and standout contemporary examples of an elastic form. Join us at the Coronet for an evening showcasing some of the very best classic and contemporary sonnets, drawn from a collection that spans poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith and W. B. Yeats, and translations of Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and César Vallejo, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Paul Muldoon has won many awards for his poetry including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University. In 2022, he was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry.

Alice Oswald was trained as a classicist at New College, University of Oxford. Revered as a major poet in her native England. Oswald’s many honours and awards include the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, an Arts Foundation Award for Poetry, a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and a Ted Hughes Award. In 2019, she became the first woman to be appointed as Oxford University Professor of Poetry, a four-year tenure.

Don Paterson is the author of numerous works of poetry and non-fiction; his writing has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009; he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and for many years taught at the University of St Andrews, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry in the School of English. From 1997 to 2022, Paterson was poetry editor at Picador.