Sinéad Morrissey (born 24 April 1972 in

Portadown Portadown ( ) is a town in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The town is based 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 ...

County Armagh County Armagh ( ) is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. It is located in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Ulster and adjoins the southern shore of Lough Neagh. It borders t ...

) 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 for her fifth collection ''

Parallax Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different sightline, lines of sight and is measured by the angle or half-angle of inclination between those two lines. Due to perspective (graphica ...

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

Life

Raised in

Belfast Belfast (, , , ; from ) is the capital city and principal port of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan and connected to the open sea through Belfast Lough and the North Channel (Great Britain and Ireland), North Channel ...

, she was educated at

Trinity College, Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Univ ...

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

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

and

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

she now lives in

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

. She was appointed writer-in-residence and then Reader in Creative Writing followed by Professor of Creative Writing at

Queen's University, Belfast The Queen's University of Belfast, commonly known as Queen's University Belfast (; abbreviated Queen's or QUB), is a public research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. The university received its charter in 1845 as part of ...

, where she was also assistant director of the Seamus Heaney Centre. 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 T. S. Eliot Prize. 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 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. Her collection, ''Through the Square Window'', won the Poetry Now Award for 2010. In January 2014 Morrissey won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection ''Parallax''. The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, 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).

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 Newcastle University

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 Writers from County Armagh