Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She is the author of six poetry collections. In 2013, she was appointed Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate. Her awards include first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize in 2013 and of The Forward Prize in 2017. In 2020 she received the European Poet of Freedom Award for her collection On Balance, translated into Polish by Magdalena Heydel. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.