Elizabeth Laird (author)

Laird has been a judge of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since its inception in 2010.

Laird's account of her travels, the storytellers and the stories themselves was published by Birlinn in 2009 under the title The Lure of the Honey Bird.

Laird set up The Ethiopian Story Collecting Project in 1996 in collaboration with Michael Sargent, the British Council in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Ministry of Education with the aim of creating reading materials in English for use in Ethiopian schools. Stories were collected in every region, amounting to over 300 in total. They were published in English and Amharic on www.ethiopianfolktales.com. A further website, www.ethiopianfolktalesforkids.com, contains a selection of the stories in simplified English with accompanying exercises and sound narration.

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 twenty 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 her brother's life.