Stephen Sexton joins us on this month’s episode of the Stinging Fly podcast, to read and discuss two poems by Sinéad Morrissey.
Stephen Sexton’s debut collection, If All The World And Love Were Young, was published in September 2019 by Penguin, and won The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in October. Sexton’s first pamphlet, Oils (Emma Press), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; he won the UK National Poetry Competition in 2016 with ‘The Curfew’; he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He lives in Belfast, where he teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown in 1972, grew up in Belfast, and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. In January 2014, she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax, and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance. In 2007, Morrissey was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, while her poem ‘Through the Square Window’ took first place in the UK National Poetry Competition the same year. She is lecturer in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast.