Feel Free

Celebrated for his novels and screenplays, Nick Laird has been 'an assured and brilliant voice' (Colm Toibin) in contemporary poetry ever since his impressive debut, To a Fault, in 2005. This is his strongest collection to date, in which we sense the deep American influence from living in New York meeting his familial shores of Northern Ireland: the acoustically generous, longer lines of the new world's Ginsberg or Whitman, and the lyricism of his forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. These are smart, energetic, worldly poems of political edge and family tenderness.

Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Feel Free (2018) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize and the Derek Walcott award. 'Up Late' the title poem from his latest collection Up Late (2023) won the Forward Prize for Best Poem. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queens' University, Belfast.