Paulin, Tom

Tom (Thomas Neilson) Paulin, the poet, critic, and playwright, was born in Leeds on 25 January 1949, brought up in Belfast, and educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford. He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972 until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry there from 1989 until 1994, when he moved to become G.M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. For fuller details of his life and achievements see Who's who .

Tom Paulin was born in 1949 in Leeds but raised in Belfast. After attending Hull and Oxford Universities, he embarked on an academic career which began at Nottingham University; since 1994 he has been teaching at Hertford College, Oxford. Paulin has apportioned his literary life into two reasonably distinct areas: he is a poet, and he is a critic. Paulin's first major volume of poetry, A State of Justice, was published by Faber and Faber in 1977; since then he has published The Strange Museum (1980), Liberty Tree (1983), Fivemiletown (1987), Selected Poems 1972-1990 (1993), Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999). He has received the Eric Gregory Award (1976), the Somerset Maugham Award (1978), and was joint winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1982). In May 2000, he was awarded a three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in order for him to write a long poem "affirming the struggle and memory of the generation that fought the Second World War." The first part of this project, The Invasion Handbook, was published in 2002. Tom Paulin's first critical book was Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception (1975). After that monograph he turned to the essay form as his favored method of criticism, publishing critical articles particularly in The London Review of Books (LRB). Many of these essays have been collected together in two volumes: Ireland and the English Crisis (1984) and Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992). A further selection of his prose, Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-1996, was published in 1996. More recently his critical work has been focussed on Unitarianism, the late eighteenth century, and particularly on William Hazlitt; in 1998 Faber published his The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style.