Born in the UK in 1974 and raised in Ghana, Nii Parkes lives in Manchester. He has performed poetry in the UK, Europe, Ghana and the US and was a 2005 Associate Artist-in-Residence with BBC Radio 3. In 2007 he was writer-in-residence at California State University, and became one of the youngest living writers to be featured in the Poems on the Underground programme in London for his poem Tin Roof. Tail of the Blue Bird is his first novel.