About Jane Holland

SHORT VERSION

Jane Holland is a poet and novelist with nearly thirty published novels, plus dozens of novellas and short stories under both this name and others. The middle child of romance legend Charlotte Lamb, she grew up in Essex and later the Isle of Man before returning to the British mainland as an adult.

Poetry
Her earliest publications were in poetry; since 1994, she has both edited poetry magazines and appeared within their pages, and has published six collections of poetry, winning a major Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. For an overview, FLASH BANG: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is available from Amazon, and she sometimes blogs on poetry at Raw Light.

Fiction
Since her debut novel, KISSING THE PINK (Sceptre, 1999), her commercial fiction has been published variously under the names Jane Holland, Victoria Lamb, Elizabeth Moss and Beth Good, and translated into numerous languages. Her novel WITCHSTRUCK won the RNA Young Adult Romantic Novel of the Year in 2013, and she is also the author of 21 WAYS TO WRITE A COMMERCIAL NOVEL.

GIRL NUMBER ONE is her first thriller.

Life
Nomadic by nature, Jane Holland currently resides in Devon with her husband and young family, and is a keen home schooler. When not writing, she also works as a freelance editor. In a previous incarnation, she was a semi-professional snooker player and reached No. 24 in the women's world rankings.


MORE DETAILS BELOW...


Jane Holland is an established English poet, novelist and critic. She won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1997 and has published five collections of poetry to date, with Bloodaxe Books, Salt Publishing, Heaventree, and Nine Arches Press. She has been Warwick Poet Laureate, and has also published and edited fiction. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and she is the former editor of arts journal Horizon Review.

As well as being a poet, Jane is a contemporary thriller writer who also writes popular commercial fiction as Victoria Lamb, Elizabeth Moss and Beth Good.
For more on her latest thrillers, visit girlnumberonethriller.com


Full Biography

Jane Holland is a poet, critic, novelist and former editor, born in Ilford, Essex, in 1966. She is the daughter of best-selling romantic novelist Charlotte Lamb and classical biographer Richard Holland, moving with them to the Isle of Man in 1977, where she lived for 23 years before returning to mainland Britain.

From 1989-1995, Jane Holland played snooker on the women's professional circuit, rising to 24th in the world, but retired from the game after a dispute with her local governing body in 1995. She began writing poetry the same year and won an ERIC GREGORY AWARD from the Society of Authors in 1996.

She founded BLADE in 1995, described by Neil Astley as 'one of Britain's gutsiest poetry magazines', and edited the magazine for nine issues until 1999.

Her first collection of poetry, THE BRIEF HISTORY OF A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN, was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. The same year, she performed on the New Blood UK Tour with fellow Bloodaxe poets Roddy Lumsden, Julia Copus, Tracey Herd and Eleanor Brown.

Jane Holland's second poetry collection, BOUDICCA & CO, was published by Salt Publishing in 2006. In 2008, she published a chapbook edition of THE LAMENT OF THE WANDERER (a new version of the Anglo-Saxon poem, with facing-text Anglo-Saxon), available from Heaventree Press, Coventry. This was followed by ON WARWICK, a pamphlet of poems from her Warwick Laureateship, published by Nine Arches Press.

CAMPER VAN BLUES, her third poetry collection, came out in October 2008 from Salt Publishing. She has since published a New & Selected: FLASH BANG.

Jane's first novel, KISSING THE PINK, came out with Sceptre in 1999 while she was at Brasenose College, Oxford, reading English as a mature undergraduate.

Her poetry, reviews and critical articles have subsequently appeared in many UK journals, including Poetry Review, Acumen, Poetry London, The North, Mslexia, Stand, Thumbscrew, London Magazine, The London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. She has run poetry workshops for adults and children, and has tutored for the Arvon Foundation alongside Alan Brownjohn.

In 2007-08, Jane Holland was Warwick Poet Laureate. From 2008-10, she was Editor-in-Chief of Horizon Review, an online arts and literary journal, and a Commissioning Editor at Salt Publishing, a British literary imprint. She currently runs an editorial service offering help and support for unpublished manuscripts: Jane Holland Editorial Services.


She also now writes thrillers as Jane Holland, historical fiction as Victoria Lamb and Elizabeth Moss, and romantic comedy as Beth Good.

Anthologies where her poetry has been featured include Bloodaxe's MAKING FOR PLANET ALICE and NEW BLOOD, Picador's ALL THE POEMS YOU NEED TO SAY I DO, edited by Peter Forbes (2004), NOT JUST A GAME, edited by Sue Dymoke & Andy Croft (Five Leaves Publications, 2006), BE MINE, an anthology of love poems edited by Sally Emerson (Little Brown 2007), and others.

Jane Holland lives in West Devon, England, with her partner and five children, where she very much misses being able to write within sight of the sea.
 
Jane Holland's literary agent is Luigi Bonomi of LBA. For festival and fiction rights enquiries, you can find her listed there under her historical fiction pseudonym Victoria Lamb.

Details of her contemporary thriller writing as Jane Holland can be found at: http://girlnumberonethriller.com/