Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, where she completed her PhD in 2003. Her poem ‘Through the Square Window’ won the National Poetry Competition in 2007. Her six poetry collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) and the Forward Best Collection Prize-winning On Balance (2017), all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and lectured in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Author photo © Florian Braakman
Shortlisted Works
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In 2023 the T. S. Eliot Prize celebrated its 30th anniversary. We marked the occasion by looking back at the collections which have won ‘the Prize poets most want to win’ (Sir Andrew Motion). When Sinéad Morrissey won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2013 with her collection Parallax (Carcanet), Ian...
The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce that the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2018 is Hannah Sullivan for her thrilling collection Three Poems, published by Faber & Faber. After months of reading and deliberation, judges Sinéad Morrissey, Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard unanimously chose the...
Judges Sinéad Morrissey (Chair), Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard have chosen the T. S. Eliot Prize 2018 Shortlist from a record 176 poetry collections submitted by, as Sinéad Morrissey says, ‘a plethora of poetry publishers’. The Shortlist comprises five debut collections, one small press, five men, five women, and two...
The T. S. Eliot Foundation is delighted to announce the judges for the 2018 Prize. The panel will be chaired by Sinéad Morrissey, alongside poets Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard. The 2018 judging panel will be looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in the...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2014. The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce that the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2013 is Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey, published by Carcanet Press. This...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2013. The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce a wonderfully diverse Shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2013. Judges Ian Duhig (Chair), Imtiaz Dharker and Vicki Feaver have...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2013. This autumn the Poetry Book Society will be organising a ten-venue national tour, funded by Arts Council England, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the T. S. Eliot Prize. At...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2009. The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce the Shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2009. Judges Simon Armitage (Chair), Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle have chosen the...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2005. The Poetry Book Society is pleased to announce the Shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2005, to be awarded to the writer of the best new collection of poetry...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2002. The Poetry Book Society and Prize sponsors www.bol.com are pleased to announce the Shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2002, to be awarded to the best collection of poetry published...
