The Irish Times, 17th October 1995

"It was brilliant for Seamus Heaney to win the Nobel Prize. He's absolutely fabulous and he really deserves it." These are the sentiments of Sinead Morrissey, a poet of 23 whose first collection, There Was Fire in Vancouver, is being published by Carcanet Press next year. Has Heaney's win encouraged her to aim for the same goal?

"No way," is her amazed response down the phone from Japan, where she is teaching English for a year. "I'm far too conscious of my own limitations to be aiming for a prize like that. I don't think I'll ever, ever be that good."

Nevertheless Sinead, who comes from Belfast, ahs already gathered a number of smaller awards, starting with the Irish Schools Creative Writing Awards, of which she won several during her teens. When she was just 18 she won the Patrick Kavanagh Award of £1,000, the only annual prize in Ireland for a first collection of unpublished poems. When she submitted her work to PN Review in the UK, the editor of Carcanet, Michael Schmidt, asked her to send him her first collection.

For Sinead, writing is "the most important thing in my life. There's nothing I feel more strongly about." She is keenly aware of the limitations of her work, and deliberately delayed publishing her first collection until she was satisfied that she had done her best. Winning prizes along the way has represented a vital form of encouragement: "The awards have been a vindication of my work and have motivated me to keep writing."