Laura Hird at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (2007)
Laura Hird
Writer
Laura Hird (born in Edinburgh) is a Scottish novelist and short story writer.
Hird spent her childhood climbing trees, playing with Action Men, being taken to opera/ballet/musicals, learning piano, entering competitions and being subsequently bullied (an ordeal which she now describes as "character-building").
Between 1988-91 she studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and worked, lived and staggered around London, graduating with a BA(Hons) in Studies in Contemporary Writing. After this, she returned to Edinburgh, working again in offices to gain back her reputation as the oldest office junior in Britain, until receiving a Scottish Arts Council Bursary in 1997 to allow her to write full-time.
Her first collection Nail and Other Stories was short-listed for the Saltire Society Literary Awards in 1998 and her first novel – Born Free – was short-listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Hope and Other Urban Tales, a novella and short story collection, followed in 2006. All her novels and collections are published by Canongate Books. Hird's first novel was published as part of the Rebel Inc. imprint at Canongate, where she also contributed to two anthologies alongside Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh.
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