Tom Paulin, honourary Doctor of Literature degree recipient, giving a poetry reading at Convocation held at Centennial Auditorium.

Bio/Historical Note: Thomas Neilson Paulin (b. 1949) was raised in Belfast in Northern Ireland where his father was the headmaster of a grammar school, and his mother was a doctor. He was educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford. Paulin lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972-1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989-1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. Paulin’s collections include A State of Justice (1977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty Tree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemiletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The Invasion Handbook (2002) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth-century essayist and radical, and (with Amit Chaudhuri), D. H. Lawrence and "Difference": The Poetry of the Present (2003), a study exploring Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon.Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone, which toured Ireland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room that was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. His latest books are The Secret Life of Poems (2007) and a translation of Euripedes' Medea.