Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six collections. Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T S Eliot Prize. In 2016 she received the E M Foster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance, received the Forward Prize in 2017 and the European Poet of Freedom Award in 2020. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate, and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.