Sinéad Morrissey

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and raised in Belfast. She earned her BA and PhD at Trinity College Dublin. After years of traveling and teaching abroad, she currently lives in Belfast, where she was appointed the city's inaugural poet laureate in 2014.

Morrissey is the author of the books of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), Parallax and Selected Poems (2013, UK; 2015, US); On Balance (2017); and Found Architecture: Selected Poems (2020). Parallax won the TS Eliot prize and is nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. In her review of Parallax in the Telegraph, Charolette Runcie wrote that the book, “is an ambitious and complex collection, which takes as its broad theme the distance between what we see and how things really are.”

In 2020 Morrissey was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Literary Award for her collection On Balance. Morrissey has also received the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and first place in the 2007 UK National Poetry Competition. She is a professor of creative writing at Newcastle University in Britain.