Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, in 1975. He is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and former lawyer. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake and Modern Gods, and his poetry collections are To a Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants and Feel Free. He co-edited the anthology, The Zoo of the New with Don Paterson. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham award, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. His poem-film, Troubles: The Life After, a collaboration with Brian Hill, was shown on BBC2 in October 2018. He is Writer-in-Residence at New York University and Professor of Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University, Belfast.