Sinéad Morrissey

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Co Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1972. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. In 2013, she was named Belfast's first poet laureate. Dr Morrissey has previously won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award and the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize. Her poem 'Through The Square Window' was awarded first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the Forward Prize-shortlisted Parallax (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. Parallax was awarded the 2013 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and is now reader in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast.