Last night at London’s Royal Festival Hall, Northern Irish poet and Trinity graduate Sinéad Morrissey added another award to her long list of accolades, receiving the Forward Poetry Prize for her sixth collection, On Balance, which was released in May.
She beat off the competition of fellow Irish poet and Trinity graduate Michael Longley, who was also shortlisted in the Best Collection category for Angel Hill. Previous winners of the prestigious prize include Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney.
Andrew Marr, chairman of the jury that picked the winner, said in a statement: “The poems in On Balance are beautifully written, emotionally charged and filled with a wonderful complexity. This is writing that successfully comes right up to the edge, again and again. We were taken by the openness, the capacity and the exuberance of this work. On Balance is a collection that readers will keep and go back to for a long time to come.” Morrissey’s win reaffirms her reputation of being the leading Irish poet of her generation. She describes the collection as her “most cohesive book” to date. “Just as it says on the tin the book interrogates ideas of balance – physical balance, structural balance, gender balance, ecological balance, life-death balance – and it does so using the high-wire act of poetic form as a conduit for that exploration.”
Praise for On Balance follows a trajectory of success from Morrissey’s previous collections. Her fifth collection, Parallax, won the Irish Times Poetry Now award, and the £15,000 TS Eliot Prize in 2014. She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award at just 18, becoming its youngest recipient. Her third collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006, and it won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize in 2005. In 2007, she became the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for “distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work”. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition, and her fourth collection of the same name became a Poetry Now Award winner in 2010.
Morrissey was born in Armagh in 1972, and underwent studies for both her BA in English and German and her PhD in eighteenth century literature in Trinity. She was the first Poet Laureate of Belfast city, and continues to reflect her northern heritage in On Balance, as she explores concepts such as equilibrium, the state of Belfast’s past and present, and the Titanic. Morrissey’s ties to the city have always been strong, as she served as writer-in-residence and later Professor of Creative Writing in Queens University. She still resides in Belfast. Morrissey currently lectures in creative writing in Newcastle University.
