Muldoon's Picnic (April 2019)

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, he has published eleven collections of poetry, including Seeing Stars (2010), Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014 (2014), The Unaccompanied (2017), and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He also writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012), and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. In 2015 he was appointed professor of poetry at Oxford University, and awarded a CBE for services to poetry. In 2018 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry. A new collection of poems, Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, is published in 2019.

Photo credit: Peter James Millson

Mary Cregan attended Middlebury College and received her PhD from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in the Financial Times. A lecturer in English literature at Barnard College, she lives in New York.

James Shapiro is professor of English at Columbia University and author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), Contested Will (2010), and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (2015). He serves on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and is Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater. His next book is Shakespeare in a Divided America.

Musician Duke Special wrote the music for and appeared in Deborah Warner’s critically acclaimed 2009 production of Mother Courage and Her Children at London’s National Theatre, presented a documentary on the life of '50s megastar Ruby Murray, and was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to write a series of original songs based on photographs for their Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand exhibition. 

More recently, he joined forces with stand-up comedian Andrew Doyle to bring a new musical adaptation of Gulliver's Travels to the Lyric Theatre in his native Belfast. In 2016 he was appointed artist-in-residence at the Lyric, where his musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn based on songs by Kurt Weill previewed in May 2018. In 2017, Duke released his latest studio album, Hallow, a collection of songs based on poems by Belfast poet Michael Longley.

Chris Harford (guitar), Ray Kubian (drums), David Mansfield (guitar), Cáit O'Riordan (bass), and Warren Zanes (guitar).