Nick Laird left Northern Ireland for Cambridge and the law, then left the law for literature. Now he and his wife, Zadie Smith, spend their days writing prize-winning books. He talks to Louise East
On paper Nick Laird is hard to like. In January his first collection of poetry, To a Fault, was published by Faber and Faber - home to TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney - and next month his first novel, Utterly Monkey, is being published by the similarly-esteemed Fourth Estate. He gave up a job as an international-litigation lawyer to write full time at 28. He is good-looking, newly married to Zadie Smith, the talented and beautiful author of White Teeth, and even admits to representing Northern Ireland in an international scout jamboree at the age of 16. For heaven's sake, get the knives out, quick.
The problem is, Laird is too likeable to be an object of begrudgery. Wry and self-deprecating, he is clear-eyed about his success, honest rather than self-mocking or defensive. He grins when I suggest it's hardly rock'n'roll to confess to a school career of straight As and prize-winning essays. "It's not a good idea to rewrite history. I don't think I was an overachiever. I just always found everything intensely interesting."
We are in a pub in Kilburn, not far from where he and Smith have just bought a house. Across the road, the Tricycle Theatre is staging the docu-play Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry; coincidentally, Laird, who was born in Cookstown, in Co Tyrone, in 1975, worked on the inquiry for a year. "It was strange. It all seemed very, very personal. Weirdly, my uncle Christy Laird was a policeman who had been there on the day and was giving evidence. People we represented would ask me, 'The Northern Irish don't really think we went out there to shoot them, do they?' and I'd say, well, actually, they do think that, yeah."
Although he has not lived in Northern Ireland since he left for Cambridge, at 18, the Troubles figure large in his writing. To a Fault is marbled with references to confiscations and Chinooks, bombs and kneecappings, as well as such apposite descriptions of the North's intransigence as: "There are others who know what it is / to lose, to hold ideas of north / so singularly brutal that the world / might be ice-bound for good." Utterly Monkey outlines the tale of Danny, a young lawyer from a thinly disguised Cookstown called Ballyglass, who opens the door of his London flat to find an old school friend on his doorstep, accompanied by an illicit wodge of loyalist cash.
Did he never want to turn his back on the place? "Because it's Northern Ireland, politics and the personal are intertwined. Even the name you use for your country, whether you call it Northern Ireland or the north of Ireland, says something about where you're from and what you believe in. You can't help but write politically."
That said, Laird is first and foremost concerned with the how rather than the what of writing. "Poetry is a funny thing in so far as there are certain things you can get into the poems and certain things you can't, and you can't write a political poem if it's just about politics." A fine literary heritage proves his point: if politics is one behemoth for an aspirant Irish poet, then the weight of brilliant Northern Irish poetry, from Heaney to Paul Muldoon, must be another. "In some ways it helped me to think I could be a writer. Like anyone who goes to a small-town comprehensive, there are careers you consider if you're halfway bright: a doctor or a lawyer, the big professions. I never thought I could be a writer, but when I read [ Heaney's] Death of a Naturalist for GCSE I just thought: I know these people; I even know even the placenames; and there's no reason why my own life isn't a fit subject for poetry."
Long before that, though, even before Laird's triumphant procession from Cookstown National School to Cookstown Primary to head boy at Cookstown High School - "They were all 10 metres from each other" - the four-year-old Nick had asserted himself as a poet. "My mum was telling me the other day that I used to bounce on the bed with my teddy bear, shouting: 'Bouncy, bouncy, on the bed, happy couple, me and ted.' My first haunting lyric," he laughs. "Then I had a hiatus of about 10 years, until I was 14, when I wrote a poem about my great-aunt Mary. I remember one of the lines was about her skin being like cling film. Terrible stuff, but I can see what I was aiming for." He looks faux serious for a moment, then laughs again.
His school filled in his forms for Cambridge University. His parents, insurance brokers both and neither a huge reader of poetry, were keen he had a vocation, so it was agreed that Laird could study English as long as he went to law school afterwards. He was fairly homesick for a year. "There was a wee bit of anti-Irish feeling, definitely. People used to get drunk and shout: 'Go back to Ireland.' But in terms of studying English, there's nowhere better, because you do the English canon from Anglo-Saxon right through to post-1970s. There are still huge gaps, obviously, but it gives you a grounding and lets you enter a tradition."
Cambridge was also where he met Smith, after she submitted a short story to an annual new- writing anthology he edited. "It was head and shoulders above everybody else, just so much better. Then I met her at the book launch, which was in our second year. We were just friends for a long time. . ." He tapers off and looks away. The rest is clearly not just history but also personal history. The pair were quickly introduced to the literary spotlight, as Smith sold and completed White Teeth, her first novel, during their final year at college.
"It was strange, but she handled it very well. I don't think it's changed her in any way, but it has changed people's reactions to her. I remember when we were in America, we'd be at parties and people would literally knock me out of the way to talk to her, and that's a very strange thing. You become the bag carrier, which is absolutely fine, but it can make you feel a bit demoralised."
Laird was sponsored through law school, meanwhile, and started work as a litigator, using his lunch hour to write poetry and book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. "I always thought I'd leave once I'd qualified, but six years later I was still doing it." Eventually, he took a sabbatical and went to Harvard for seven months, using the time to finish his poetry manuscript and start a novel, but returning to work was harder than he expected. "I went back in on Monday morning at 9am, and by 2pm I was back in the same chambers, with the same barrister and the same client on the same case."
He left not long after, but his time as a litigator provided good material for Utterly Monkey. "If you do a lot of corporate work, you find yourself morally compromised a lot of the time. It's quite easy not to think about it and just do the job, but if you sit down and think about it, you realise you're actually doing the devil's work a lot of the time. You're making money for people who have lots of money and you're screwing lots of people. One case I worked on was not dissimilar to the case in the book, and I'd found it ethically difficult, but I didn't do anything about it. So I thought, what would have happened if I had decided to scupper it?"
After a few anxious months, during which he sold his house to get himself out of a financial pickle, Laird got two two-book deals, one for poetry, the other for fiction. The reviews of To a Fault have been mostly enthusiastic, and late last month, a day after the collection was savaged on Rattlebag, RTÉ Radio 1's arts programme, Laird's phone rang with the news that he had been awarded the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish literature. "And I'd just been thinking that everyone in Ireland hated me," he says with a grin.
"I keep expecting to get a kicking, and I'm sure I will with the novel, but you just think, well, if someone doesn't like it, they're perfectly entitled not to like it. You try and do things that wouldn't leave you open, so you turn things down that seem a little bit silly, like modelling clothes for a style magazine, but people will always say, oh, he only got a book published because he's Zadie Smith's husband. You just take it on the chin and ignore it. It's not ideal, but, sure, if you want to sell books you have to do it."
Nowadays Laird and Smith, who have always been each other's first readers, work at different desks in the same house, both allotting themselves targets of 1,000 words a day and both wearing earplugs. "We let each other get on with it as far as we can. We have lunch together and dinner together, but because we're both in the same house you find yourself popping out in the afternoon, and having a cup of tea, or going for a walk. We could be more disciplined, but we get the work done."
He is already halfway through his next book of poetry and has started a second novel. Asked what he hopes for in the next couple of years, he says immediately: "To produce two more books, and we'd like to get a dog. Zadie's book [ On Beauty] comes out in September, and we have to go to America for that, so we've put the dog on hold. But that's about it. Keep writing and get a dog."