Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His poetry collections are To A Fault, On Purpose and Go Giants. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover's Mistake and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he co-edited the anthology The Zoo of the New with Don Paterson, and is currently a Writer-in-Residence at New York University.