T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry 2013 goes to QUB’s Sinéad Morrissey

After being shortlisted for the prestigious prize four times, the award-winning Queen’s University poet and Reader in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at the School of English; Dr Sinéad Morrissey has won this year’s T.S Eliot £15,000 Prize for Poetry with her poetry collection, Parallax.

Dr Sinéad Morrissey, Reader in Creative Writing at Queen’s, said: “Having been shortlisted for the prize on previous occasions, it’s a joy and honour to have finally won. I’m thrilled.”

In a year of brilliantly themed collections, the chair of judges, Ian Duhig, said he and his fellow judges; Imtiaz Dharker and Vicki Feaver, had been unanimous in choosing Sinéad Morrissey’s collection, Parallax, from among the 10 titles shortlisted as the overall winner.

Morrissey alongside the T.S Eliot prize judes

Award-winning poet and Judge Ian Duhig described the collection as: “politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.”

Morrissey’s winning collection; Parallax!

While her win may put her alongside former winners such as Alice Oswold, Derek Walcott and Ted Hughes, 2013 seems to be the year of Sinéad Morrissey! In July 2013, the month her fifth collection, Parallax, was published, Morrissey became Belfast’s first poet laureate! Alongside Carol Ann Duffy (England), Liz Lochhead (Scotland) and Gillian Clarke (Wales), she completes a quartet of poet laureates in the British Isles who are all women.

Belfast’s first poet laureate!

Sinéad Morrissey also becomes the fifth Northern Irish poet to win the T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry. The first inaugural winner of the prize was Professor Ciaran Carson, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s, in 1993. Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley and Former Queen’s University student, staff member and honorary graduate Seamus Heaney has also previously won the award.

It makes you wonder whether any other city could possibly achieve and boast what Belfast has in its literary success?