Poet awarded $75,000 fellowship

Sinead Morrissey is a lecturer at Queen's

A Belfast poet has been awarded a US$75,000 fellowship for outstanding literary work.

Dr Sinead Morrissey is a creative writing lecturer at Queen's University in Belfast.

She is receiving the Lannan Foundation fellowship for "distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work".

Ms Morrisey has published three collections of poetry and in 2005 she won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize.

This fellowship was announced at the Lannan Foundation's 19th annual literary awards and fellowship ceremony in New Mexico this week.

Candidates for fellowships from the Lannan Foundation are recommended by a network of poets, writers, literary scholars, publishers, and editors, who are anonymous.

Ms Morrissey said she was thrilled at the award and honoured to follow in the footsteps of previous winners such as Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.

"I look forward to the freedom to develop new work which this fellowship enables," she said.