Nick Laird

Nick Laid is an Irish poet and a novelist. His works depict relationships between men and women; he has also written on themes of people with a disturbed childhood. He took birth in Cooks town, Northern Ireland in the year 1975.

The young writer has written half a dozen novels and poetry anthologies combined. He has won several awards for his writings including Dylan Thomas Prize, Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, Forward Poetry Award, Eric Gregory Award, etc. Nick moved out of Ireland to explore other horizons, and that has given his work some boost.

He took birth in Cooks town, Northern Ireland in the year 1975. His parents are Carol and Alastair Laird. As a child, he went to the Cooks town High School. Later, he joined the Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. After graduating in 1997, he attended the University of Cambridge, England and gained a first in English.

At college, he won creative writing Arthur Quiller-Couch Award. He also fell in love with Zadie Smith Zadie Smith FRSL is an English short story writer, >> Read More... at Cambridge University, and they both got married in 2004. They have a daughter Katharine and a son Harvey. After Cambridge, Nick went on to work for Allen and Overy, a law firm in London; he worked there for six years, before resigning to work on his writing.

In 2005, Laird published his first collection of poems, To a Fault. It revolved around the relationships against social and political backdrops. It got nominated for the Best First Collection Forward prize. Two years later in 2007, he published another collection of poems in the book, On purpose. It also revolved around relationships and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and Somerset Maugham Award.

In 2015, his third collection of poems, Go Giants got published; it explored Irish-American relationships. All of the three books got published by Faber and Faber. Nick also wrote three novels, Utterly Monkey- a tale of two Irish childhood friends, published in 2005.

It won the Betty Trask Prize. Glover’s Mistake- a story of an art student, published in 2007. And Modern Gods- published in 2017, dedicated to his wife, Zadie Smith. His novels got nominated for Commonwealth award and Kerry Group Listowel Fiction prize. When Nick moved out of Ireland, it helped him explore other horizons, and that boosted his work as a writer. He lived in Italy, New York Click to look into! >> Read More... , and now lives with his family in London.