Sinead Morrissey (Ireland) has read for the Hewitt Society on many occasions, including the International Summer School in 2016, alongside Sarah Howe and in 2007 with Ciaran Carson. She has also read for the Hewitt’s 2015 Carnlough Spring School, with Frank Ormsby.
Sinéad has published six collections of poetry, all with Carcanet: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996); Between Here and There (2002); The State of the
Prisons (2005); Through the Square Window (2009); Parallax (2013) and On Balance (2017). Her selected poems, Found Architecture, was published in 2020.
Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Poetry Now Award (2009, 2013), the T.S. Eliot Prize (2013), the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2016), and the Forward Prize (2017). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019, and in April 2020 was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. Previously with the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, she has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-14) and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.