Sinead Morrissey at Durham Book Festival

Sinéad Morrissey (born 24 April 1972 in

Portadown Portadown () is a town in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The town sits on the River Bann in the north of the county, about southwest of Belfast. It is in the Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council area and had a population of a ...

County Armagh County Armagh (, named after its county town, Armagh) is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. Adjoined to the southern shore of Lough Neagh, the county covers an area of an ...

) is a Northern Irish poet.Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey wins prestigious TS Eliot Prize
/ref> In January 2014 she won the

T. S. Eliot Prize The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Priz ...

for her fifth collection ''

Parallax Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. Due to foreshortening, nearby object ...

'' and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection ''On Balance''.

Life

Raised in

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdom ...

, she was educated at

Trinity College, Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

, where she took BA and PhD degrees. After periods living in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

and

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island coun ...

she now lives in

Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to: *Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England *Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England *Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...

. She was appointed writer-in-residence and then Reader in Creative Writing at

Queen's University, Belfast , mottoeng = For so much, what shall we give back? , top_free_label = , top_free = , top_free_label1 = , top_free1 = , top_free_label2 = , top_free2 = , established = , closed = , type = Public research university , parent = ...

. In 2016 she was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Morrissey has two children.

Works

She has published six collections of poetry: ''There Was Fire in Vancouver'' (1996), ''Between Here and There'' (2001), ''The State of the Prisons'' (2005), ''Through the Square Window'' (2009), and ''

'' (2013), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the

. In 2017 she published her sixth collection ''On Balance'', which was awarded the Forward Prize for Poetry.

Awards

She won the

Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is an Irish poetry award for a collection of poems by an author who has not previously been published in collected form. It is confined to poets born on the island of Ireland, or who have Irish nationality, or are ...

in 1990. Her collection, ''The State of the Prisons'', was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. The same collection won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize in 2005. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for "distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work". Her poem "Through the Square Window" won first prize in the 2007 British

National Poetry Competition The National Poetry Competition is an annual poetry prize established in 1978 in the United Kingdom. It is run by the UK-based Poetry Society and accepts entries from all over the world, with over 10,000 poems being submitted to the competition ...

. Her collection, ''Through the Square Window'', won the Poetry Now Award for 2010. In January 2014 Morrissey won the

T.S. Eliot Prize The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Priz ...

for her fifth collection ''Parallax''. The chair of the judging panel,

Ian Duhig Robert Ian Duhig (born 9 February 1954 London) is a British poet. In 2014, he was a chair of the final judging panel for the T. S. Eliot Prize awards. Life He was the eighth of eleven children born to Irish parents. He graduated from Leeds Uni ...

, remarked that the collection was 'politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.'"Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey wins prestigious TS Eliot Prize"
/ref> In September 2017 Morrissey's sixth collection ''On Balance'' was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. In 2019 she was a contributor to ''A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West'' (

Gingko Library Gingko is a UK-based charitable foundation created in 2014 to promote dialogue and understanding with the Middle East, West Asia and North Africa through conferences, publications, events and cultural programmes. It should not be confused with Ging ...

Bibliography

* ''There Was Fire in Vancouver'' (Carcanet Press, 1996) * ''Between Here and There'' (Carcanet Press, 2001) * ''The State of the Prisons'' (Carcanet Press, 2005) * ''Through the Square Window'' (Carcanet Press, 2009) * '' Parallax: And Selected Poems'' (Carcanet Press, 2013) * ''On Balance'' (Carcanet Press, 2017)

Pamphlets and Limited Editions

* ''The Italian Chapel'' - (Metal engravings by Maribel Mas. Published by Andrew J Moorhouse, Fine Press Poetry, 2019)

References

External links

* *
Dr Sinead Morrissey' profile at The Queen's University, Belfast

Profile on ContemporaryWriters.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Morrissey, Sinead 1972 births Living people Women poets from Northern Ireland Writers from Belfast People from Portadown Alumni of Trinity College Dublin People educated at Belfast High School 20th-century Irish poets 21st-century Irish poets 21st-century women writers from Northern Ireland T. S. Eliot Prize winners