The accolade, now in its sixth year, aims to promote European poetry.
Morrissey was honoured for a volume of poems entitled On Balance, in a translation by Magda Heydel.
Jury chairman Krzysztof Czyżewski said that Morrissey’s poetry “seeks balance, not for herself, but for a world that has fallen off its tracks, subjected to the rush of conquest, social atomization, and alienation.”
He added: “Enslavement reaches us through violence against nature, social disintegration, exclusion of the less privileged and hierarchies of values imposed by the corrupted with conformism to power and wealth.”
The award ceremony will take place on August 31 in Gdańsk, followed by a meeting with the winners—the poet and her translator—the next day.
Born in 1972, Morrissey is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. She spent long periods abroad, among others in Japan and New Zealand, before returning to Belfast.
In 2014, the city appointed her its inaugural poet laureate.
On Balance, published in 2017, is her sixth volume of poetry.
Morrissey teaches creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast and at Newcastle University.
Magda Heydel is a prominent Polish translator of English-language literature, including works by Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.
She teaches the theory and practice of literary translation at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, southern Poland.
(mk/gs)
Source: www.europejskipoetawolności, PAP