SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2018

Nick Laird has been an assured and brilliant voice in contemporary poetry since his acclaimed debut, To a Fault, in 2005. Feel Free, his fourth collection, effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint - the family, the impress of history, the body itself - and how we might transcend them.

Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird's most remarkable work to date.

Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His poetry collections are To A Fault, On Purpose and Go Giants. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover's Mistake and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he co-edited the anthology The Zoo of the New with Don Paterson, and is currently a Writer-in-Residence at New York University.