Paul Muldoon was a student of Seamus Heaney

The County Armagh-born former BBC Northern Ireland producer won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel.

The prizes are awarded by Columbia University on recommendations of the Pulitzer board, which considers nominations from jurors in each category.

The awards are named after Joseph Pulitzer, the founder of one of the first mass-circulation newspapers, the New York World, in the 1890s.

Born in 1951, Muldoon was educated at his local grammar school, where he was introduced to the Irish language and poetry.

The son of a schoolteacher and a labourer learned the Faber Book of Modern Verse "more or less off by heart", and at the age of 17, began writing poetry.

Pulitzer Prize Winners 2003 General Non-fiction: A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power Biography: Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by Robert Caro History: An Army at Dawn: the North African Campaign 1942-43, by Rick Atkinson Fiction: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides Poetry: Moy Sand and Gravel, by Paul Muldoon Drama: Anna in the Tropics, by Nilo Cruz Music: On the Transmigration of Souls, by John Adams

At Queen's University in Belfast, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney became his tutor and helped him to publish some of his work.

After graduating in the early 1970s, he worked as a reporter and then a television producer at BBC Northern Ireland.

He moved to the US in 1987 following the death of his father, and lives with his wife, writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, and their two children near Princeton, New Jersey.

He is currently an honorary professor of poetry at Oxford and a full-time teacher of creative writing at Princeton University.

He has been awarded various literary prizes including the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1991, the TS Eliot Award for The Annals of Chile in 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1996, and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for his New Selected Poems.

Other finalists for the $7,500 poetry prize were Music Like Dirt by Frank Bidart and Hazmat by JD McClatchy.