Overview

Northern Ireland is on fire. But rather than attending to the conflict raging around her, the young Sinéad Morrissey is obsessed with the Cold War, East Germany and the utopia of the USSR. Set against the distinctive cultural milieu of Belfast Communism – its smoky meeting rooms, protests, marches, sports days, holidays, discos and Party bazaars – Among Communists tells a history of the Troubles unlike any other whilst simultaneously charting a young writer’s journey into poetry. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, surprising everyone – Western Communists most of all – Morrissey’s family followed suit and fell apart. This memoir charts those personal and political earthquakes, weaving together a lyrical exploration of familial love, belief, contrariness and loss, and of the galvanising power of sudden endings to make and re-make the past.

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9781800174061

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Reviews

'Sinéad Morrissey [is] one of those generous writers whose images and structures open so invitingly that your response is to grab a pen and write back to her: in other words, an inspiration.' Hilary Mantel

'Sinead Morrissey [is] one of those generous writers whose images and structures open so invitingly that your response is to grab a pen and write back to her: in other words, an inspiration.' Hilary Mantel

Author Information

Sinead Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinead Morrissey was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdansk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Sinead Morrissey is a frequent contributor to PN Review.

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