Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. The author of three novels, Utterly Monkey, Glover's Mistake, and Modern Gods, four collections of poetry, To a Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants and Feel Free, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. His last collection, Feel Free, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot award and the Derek Walcott Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is on faculty at New York University, and is the Seamus Heaney Chair of Poetry at Queens’ University, Belfast.