Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, Parallax, published by Carcanet Press, has just been awarded the TS Eliot Prize.
The collection is preoccupied with the ways we approach objects, people and places in photography and poetry, and how our perspective is manipulated without our knowing it. “The first poem I wrote was inspired by Alexander Robert Hogg’s photography of Belfast slum life, and how the photographs falsify what they show,” she told the NS this week.
This multiple or “parallax” view is specifically Northern Irish. “Back home things tend to be very bipartisan. There’s two dominant camps and their view of things is different from each other.” Morrissey, who was raised by an Irish Catholic father and English Anglican mother, says she has always felt herself to exist “outside that binary”. “It was very helpful to me in developing a flexibility of approach.”
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