Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind.

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists.

She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award among many others, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Zadie Smith lives in London and New York with her husband and two children. Swing Time is her fifth novel.

Nick Laird was born in 1975 in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and until recently worked as a lawyer in London.

His poems, essays and reviews have been published in various anthologies and journals including the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

Laird's first poetry collection, ‘To a Fault’, is published by Faber and Faber.