Staff Profile

Who Am I?

I am a Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and contribute to the delivery of the Creative Writing curriculum in the School of English at undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD-level.

The multi-award-winning author of six poetry collections, my prizes include the T S Eliot Prize (2013), the Forward Prize (2017) and the European Poet of Freedom Award (2020). In Ireland, I have received the Irish Times Poetry Prize twice. In the US, I have received both a Lannan Award (2007) and the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2016). I was appointed Belfast Poet Laureate in 2013 and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

What Have I Been Up To Recently?

In 2021, courtesy of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, I began work on a long-form prose memoir about my Communist childhood in Belfast during the 1980s. Seeing Red explores my own coming-of-age at the crux of two coterminous, intersecting conflicts - the Cold War, and the Northern Irish Troubles - and details the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc through the lens of an individual Western Communist Irish family.

You can listen to me talking about some of the themes of my new book in a Radio 3 essay (2022) here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018yn2

You can listen to me being interviewed about my book on BBC Radio 3's The Verb (2023) here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hxl3

You can watch me being interviewed about the Communist Party of Ireland before the Fall of the Berlin Wall as part of the Irish-language documentary Reds na Éireann (2023) here:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27874261/

Education

PhD. English Literature, French Revolutionary Period. Trinity College, Dublin. (2003 - Ussher Scholarship).

BA Hons. German and English. Trinity College, Dublin. First Class. (1995)

Professional Affiliations

FRSL Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected 2019)

AHRC Peer Review College (2017-2020)

MHEA Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2010)

Poetry Awards

The European Poet of Freedom Award (2020)

The Forward Prize for Best Collection (2017) 

E M Forster Award (The American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2016) 

National Book Circle Critics’ Award for Poetry (finalist, 2016)  

Inaugural Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-2014) 

T S Eliot Prize (2013) 

Irish Times/Poetry Now Award (2013) 

Major Individual Artist Award (Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 2012) 

Irish Times/Poetry Now Award (2009) 

Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA, 2007) 

UK National Poetry Competition (First Prize, 2007) 

The Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize (2005) 

The Rupert and Eithne Strong Award (2002) 

The MacAulay Fellowship (Arts Council of Ireland, 2002) 

Eric Gregory Award (1996) 

The Patrick Kavanagh Award (1990) 

POETRY COLLECTIONS

• There Was Fire in Vancouver (Carcanet, 1996)
• Between Here and There (Carcanet, 2002)
• The State of the Prisons (Carcanet, 2005)
• Through the Square Window (Carcanet, 2009)
• Parallax (Carcanet, 2013)
• On Balance (Carcanet, 2017)

SELECTED POEMS

• Parallax and Selected Poems (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2015)
• Found Architecture: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2020)

ANTHOLOGIES

• The Future Always Makes me so Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (co-editor, Blackstaff Press, 2016)
• Donald Davie: Selected Poems (editor; Carcanet Press, 2022)

INTERDISCIPLINARY

• Up by the Roots: a music/poetry collaboration with composer Piers Hellawell (Edition Peters, 2016).
• Gone Westering: a music/poetry collaboration with Shetland fiddler and composer, Catriona MacDonald (2019).

CURRENT PROJECT

• Seeing Red: a long-form prose memoir about my Communist childhood in Belfast during the Troubles funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

I have been teaching Creative Writing for 21 years with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on poetry. I have taught at all levels of the curriculum and to date have supervised nine PhD Creative Writing Poetry students to completion.

• Authored Book

  • Morrissey S. On Balance. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 2017.

• Musical Composition

  • Macdonald C, Morrissey S. Gone Westering. . Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle Poetry Festival, 2019.

• Performance

  • Macdonald C, Morrissey S, De La Haye D. Gone Westering. 2019. Gateshead: The Sage Gateshead, 20mins.