Belfast poet Sinéad Morrissey has released a memoir titled Among Communists detailing her childhood in a family committed to Western Communism during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Morrissey grew up in multiple houses in Belfast, including one on the University of Ulster campus at Jordanstown. Her parents raised her and her brother Conor with Marxist-Leninist ideas and loyalty to the Soviet Union. They attended Communist Party meetings, protest marches, and bazaars in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s.

Her father Mike chaired the Connolly Youth Movement and met her mother Hazel, who came from Sheffield on a communist holiday, at a party meeting in Belfast in 1968. Morrissey's paternal grandfather Sean Morrissey became a communist while interned in Northern Ireland during World War II as a suspected IRA member. He later visited the USSR twice as an honored guest.

The family attended state schools that were Protestant and middle class. Morrissey described switching between her home life of radical politics and vegetarian meals and her school environment where families supported unionism.

A trip to Moscow funded by the British Council and Northern Ireland Arts Council led Morrissey to access Soviet files on her family, inspiring the memoir. She shifted the narrative to inhabit her younger self's perspective after feedback from colleagues.

Morrissey holds that Marx accurately identified flaws in capitalism and its victims but views the communist solution as flawed due to ties to a corrupt system. Her mother left communism for New Age spirituality after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, contributing to the family's breakup.

Named Belfast's first poet laureate in 2014, Morrissey won the Patrick Kavanagh poetry award at 18 after studying at Trinity College Dublin. She now serves as professor of creative writing at Newcastle University.