Additional information
by Sinéad Morrissey (Author)
Northern Ireland is on fire. But rather than attending to the conflict raging around her, the young Siné ad 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.
Author Biography
Siné ad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. 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.
