Staff Profile
Professor Sinead Morrissey
Professor of Creative Writing
- Email: sinead.morrissey@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: 0191 208 3533
- Address: SELLL, Percy Building,
Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU
Background
Current Position:
Professor of Creative Writing, Newcastle University
Director, Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts
Co-Director, Newcastle Poetry Festival
Previous Position:
Professor of Creative Writing, Queen’s University Belfast.
Education:
1990-1995
BA Hons. German and English: Trinity College, Dublin. First Class.
1999-2003
PhD: “Servants in British Fictions of the 1790s”.
Trinity College, Dublin.
2010
PGCHET (Higher Education Teacher Training Certificate) Queen’s University, Belfast.
Employment History,
Queen’s University, Belfast:
2002-2005 Writer in Residence
2006-2010 Lecturer in Creative Writing
2010-2012 Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
2012-2015 Reader in Creative Writing
2015-2016 Professor in Creative Writing
Professional Affiliations:
FRSL Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
MHEA Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
AHRC Peer Review College (2017-2020)
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)
Research
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 (as co-editor)
- The Future Always Makes me so Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff Press, 2016)
INTERDISCIPLINARY
- Up by the Roots: a music/poetry collaboration with composer Piers Hellawell (Edition Peters, 2016).
In addition I have published individual poems widely in national and international poetry journals including Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, as well as having poems featured in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the New Statesman. My work has also been broadly anthologised.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
In my capacity as NCLA Director at Newcastle I have overseen the following projects:
- Finding a Voice: Poetry in Prison (funded by the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal)
- Newcastle Poetry Festival 2018, 2019 (funded by Arts Council England)
- Inside Writing, 2020 (funded by the Catherine Cookson Foundation)
I am currently working on the following project:
- In Person: Bloodaxe Books (funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust)
In February 2021 I will take up a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for two years in order to write a collection of lyric essays entitled "Seeing Red: An Anatomy of an Irish Communist Childhood" on Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
Teaching
I have been teaching creative writing for fifteen years with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on poetry. I have taught at all levels of the curriculum and to date have supervised six PhD Creative Writing Poetry students to completion. At Newcastle I will be working primarily with MA poetry students as well as undertaking PhD supervision in Creative Writing (Poetry).Publications
- Morrissey S. On Balance. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 2017.
- Macdonald C, Morrissey S. Gone Westering. . Newcastle Poetry Festival, 2019.