Jane Holland is an English poet and novelist. 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. She also writes commercial fiction under the pseudonyms Betty Walker, JJ Holland, Victoria Lamb, Elizabeth Moss, Beth Good and Hannah Coates. Her novel Witchstruck, written as Victoria Lamb, won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Young Adult Romantic Novel of the Year Award for 2013.
Biography
Jane Holland was born on 17 November 1966 in Ilford, London, England, the daughter of the romantic novelistSheila Ann Mary Coates Holland and classical biographer and ex-Times journalist Richard Holland. 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. Holland edited the small poetry magazineBlade from 1995 to 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 others being Roddy Lumsden, Julia Copus, Tracey Herd and Eleanor Brown. Holland was the Warwick Poet Laureate for 2008. She founded the Poets On Fire website and forum, and was 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. She edited the online arts magazine Horizon Review from 2008 to 2010 and was a commissioning editor at Embrace Books from 2010 to 2011. Holland's first collection was in a 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. was published by Salt Publishing in 2006. Camper Van Blues was published by Salt in 2008. Two poetry pamphlets were also published in 2008: The Lament of the Wanderer , a new translation of the eponymous Anglo-Saxon poem, and On Warwick, a collection of poems written during her year as Warwick Poet Laureate, including the long experimental poem On Warwick Castle. Now a full-time fiction writer, she has written numerous bestselling thrillers as Jane Holland, including her most popular novel to date, Girl Number One , which was a UK Kindle #1 Bestseller in December 2015, as well as a string of romances, historicals and contemporary novels variously under the pseudonyms JJ Holland, Beth Good, Victoria Lamb, Elizabeth Moss, and others.
