Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. Awards for his writing include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Feel Free was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott Award. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.
