Jane Holland



Jane Holland (b. November 1966 in Ilford, Essex, England) is an award-winning English poet, performer and novelist whose poems have been widely published in magazines and broadcast on the radio. She won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for her poetry in 1996. Her sister is the novelist, actress and singer Sarah Holland.

Biography
Jane Holland was born on November 1966 at Ilford, Essex, England. The daughter of the romantic novelist Sheila Ann Mary Coates Holland (Charlotte Lamb) and the classical biographer and ex-Times journalist Richard Holland, she runs a blog about her mother's books. She moved with her parents to the Isle of Man in 1977, where she lived for 23 years. She has four siblings: the novelist, actress and singer Sarah Holland, Charlotte, Michael and David.

She edited the small poetry magazine 'Blade' from 1995–1999, and published her first full-length collection of poetry in 1997, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, with Bloodaxe Books, followed in 1999 by a first novel, Kissing the Pink, with Sceptre. She was also one of five young Bloodaxe poets who performed on the New Blood UK Tour of 1997; the other poets involved were Roddy Lumsden, Julia Copus, Tracey Herd and Eleanor Brown.

Jane Holland was the Warwick Poet Laureate for 2008. She founded the Poets On Fire website and forum, and was also a prominent member of the Birmingham-based performance poetry and spoken word group New October Poets in 2006, when she was named one of the top poetry performers in the West Midlands under the 'Six of the Best' scheme. Jane Holland was Editor-in-Chief of the online arts magazine Horizon Review (Salt Publishing) from 2008 - 2010, and a commissioning editor at Embrace Books from 2010 - 2011.

Holland's first collection was in the mainstream British tradition, generally as a 'nature' poet rather than an urban stylist, citing Ted Hughes as a major early influence. Recent work includes a long narrative poem sequence written in the voice of Boudicca and a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer.

Boudicca & Co. Salt Publishing was published in 2006. A new collection Camper Van Blues was published by Salt in 2008. Two poetry pamphlets were also published in 2008: The Lament of the Wanderer [Heaventree Press], a new translation of the eponymous Anglo-Saxon poem, and On Warwick [Nine Arches Press] a collection of poems written during her year as Warwick Poet Laureate, including the long experimental poem 'On Warwick Castle'.

Works

 * ''The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman (1997)
 * ''Kissing the Pink (1999)
 * Boudicca & Co. (2006)
 * Camper Van Blues (2008)
 * ''The Lament of the Wanderer (2008)
 * ''On Warwick (2008)