Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. 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 the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and lives in New York with his wife, the writer Zadie Smith, and their two children.