Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland and studied at Cambridge University. He has published two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover’s Mistake, and three collections of poetry, To a Fault, On Purpose, and Go Giants. He is the recipient of many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Columbia University in New York.