Elizabeth Laird (author)

Elizabeth Laird (born 1943) is a British writer of children's fiction and travel. She is also known for the large body of folktales which she collected from the regions of Ethiopia. Her books have been translated into at least fifteen languages.

Laird was born in New Zealand in 1943. She was the fourth child of her Scottish father and New Zealand mother. The family settled in Purley, near London in 1945. A fifth child was born in 1947. He suffered severe disabilities and died in 1949. Laird's first children's novel, Red Sky in the Morning (Heinemann, 1988), was inspired in some measure by his life.

At the age of 18, Laird travelled to Malaysia, and worked for a year as a teaching assistant in Kolej Tunku Kurshiah, Seremban. She was fortunate to recover from the bite of a poisonous snake in the South China Sea.

After finishing her degree at Bristol University and qualifying as a teacher from the Institute of Education in London, Laird took up a post at the Prince Bede Mariam Laboratory School, which was attached to the University of Addis Ababa. She spent two years in Ethiopia, travelling widely, often on foot and on horseback, and developed an abiding interest in the country.

After finishing a master's degree in Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Laird worked for five years in Southall at the Pathway Further Education Centre, setting up language teaching programmes in factories and hospitals for newly arrived immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.

She met her husband David McDowall on an aeroplane in India, while travelling to Bhopal to teach in a summer school for Indian university teachers. They married in 1975.

David McDowall was working at the time with the British Council in Baghdad, where they began their married life, and where Laird joined the Iraq Symphony Orchestra as a violinist. A visit to the Kurdish region in the north of Iraq would later be the inspiration for Laird's second novel, Kiss the Dust (Heinemann, 1990). Their first son, Angus, was born in 1977.

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