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Nick Laird

Biography

Nick Laird

Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland and studied at Cambridge University. He has published three novels --- UTTERLY MONKEY, GLOVER'S MISTAKE and MODERN GODS --- 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.

Nick Laird

Books by Nick Laird

Modern Gods
by Nick Laird - Fiction

Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, Alison Donnelly hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent college professor, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s second wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion. Both sisters’ lives are about to be shaken apart. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult.