Poet and educator Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and raised in Belfast. As she told the Forward Arts Foundation, “I knew I wanted to write poetry seriously, all my life, from the age of ten onwards.” She earned both her BA and PhD from Trinity College Dublin. In 1990, Morrissey became the youngest poet to win the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. She lived and taught in Japan and New Zealand before returning to Belfast in 1999.
Morrissey is the author of six 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), On Balance (2017), and Found Architecture: Selected Poems (2020), all from Carcanet Press. Parallax won the T. S. Eliot prize and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, while On Balance won the European Poet of Freedom Literary Award and the Forward Prize for Poetry. Three of Morrissey’s first four collections were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Morrissey also authored the artists’ book The Italian Chapel (Fine Press Poetry, 2019, with artist Maribel Mas). She edited Donald Davie: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2022) and co-edited The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff Press, 2016).
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Morrissey was named Belfast’s inaugural poet laureate in 2013. Her work has been honored with two Irish Times Poetry Now awards, the Eric Gregory Award, the Michael Hartnett Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first place in the UK’s National Poetry Competition in 2007.
Morrissey was appointed writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast, where she later became a professor of creative writing and assistant director of the Seamus Heaney Centre. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Newcastle University in Britain and is at work on Seeing Red, a long-form prose memoir about her childhood during the Troubles.
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More Sinéad Morrissey
Text: Read "Love Song" by Morrissey at Wake Forest Press
Text/Audio: Read and listen to three poems by Morrissey
Video: Morrissey speaks and reads at the Lannan Readings and Talks Series
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Photo by Florian Braakman.