School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics

Staff Profile

Professor Sinead Morrissey

Professor of Creative Writing

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 upon Tyne: Newcastle Poetry Festival, 2019.