Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She is the author of six poetry collections: 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 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. Both Through the Square Window and Parallax received the Irish Times Poetry Prize. She was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize in 2013 and of The Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2017. In 2013, she was appointed Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts at Newcastle University.