About

Jane Holland was born in Essex in 1966. She writes poetry and literary fiction as Jane Holland, and popular commercial fiction under the pen-name Victoria Lamb and others, including Elizabeth Moss.

Her latest fiction as Jane Holland can be read in Overheard, a literary anthology edited by Jonathan Taylor. Her short story, The Cell, explores the inner and outer landscapes of a third century 'Desert Mother', a female Christian hermit.

Daughter of romantic novelist Charlotte Lamb and classical biographer Richard Holland, Jane moved 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. (Now out of print, a New Edition is available on Kindle, under the title Disreputable.) 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 controversial new version of the Anglo-Saxon poem. This was followed by On Warwick, a pamphlet of poems from her Warwick Laureateship, published by Nine Arches Press.

Camper Van Blues is her most recent poetry collection.  

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 also a Commissioning Editor at Salt Publishing, a British literary imprint. She acted as Executive Editor for women's fiction imprint Embrace Books from 2010-11.

Anthologies where her work 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), and BE MINE, an anthology of love poems edited by Sally Emerson (Little Brown 2007).