Please join us to celebrate the launch of Among Communists: A Memoir by Sinéad Morrissey, in conversation with Suzanne Joinson (author of The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things).

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

About the Book:

Belfast 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. She is also writing everything down. Set against the backdrop of a vanished culture of Belfast Communism – its endless meetings thick with cigarette smoke, its protests, marches, sports days, holidays, discos and jumble sales – Among Communists tells a history of the Northern Irish conflict unlike any other while simultaneously charting a young writer’s journey into writing poetry.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, surprising everyone – Western Communists most of all – the nuclear family that had served as Morrissey’s political and emotional crucible collapsed as well. 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.

About the Speakers:

Sinéad 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.

Suzanne Joinson is a writer living in Worthing in Sussex, UK. She has published two novels with Bloomsbury UK/US: A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar (US National Bestseller, translated into sixteen languages, and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and The Photographer’s Wife (published internationally and translated into Chinese). She regularly writes fiction, travel pieces and essays for a range of publications including The New York Times, Conde Nast, and many others. Her memoir, The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things came out in September 2024 with The Indigo Press.