Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1982. She won the Peggy Ramsay Award for playwriting and has recently been selected to be a playwright in residence at the National Theatre. She now lives in London.
The Benefactors (2025) Wendy Erskine "Wendy Erskine's writing is inimitable - so fresh, so sharp, so wry, so alive; so much contemporary fiction feels flat and fake in comparison. In all of its glorious polyphony, The Benefactors brims with humanity. It's got snap, it's got sparkle, it's got soul. All of Belfast is here, all of life. I adored it."
The Rest of Our Lives (2025) Ben Markovits "A deft, agile, intricate portrait of family life and midlife crisis, razor-sharp insights delivered with a throwaway lightness of touch . . . A perfect contemporary take on the American road-trip novel."
Madame Matisse (2025) Sophie Haydock "Gorgeously evocative, ambitious in its scope, Madame Matisse sweeps through many of the major events of the twentieth century, whilst remaining laudably faithful to the true coordinates of people, places, artworks and events. A nuanced and humane portrait of three very different women who helped the artist achieve greatness."
This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (2024) Naomi Wood "Sharp and fresh and painful and funny, these are clever and illuminating stories about contemporary motherhood. There's great pleasure to be found in these spiky women giving sarcastic retorts to their fragmented lives, and solidarity in their loneliness, and the ways that society and its structures have let them down."
Night Swimmers (2024) Roisin Maguire "Grumpy, irascible, sharp-tongued but huge-hearted, utterly at home in her skin, Grace is a force of nature - it's impossible not to be swept up in admiration for her, and for Roisin Maguire, who has written such a warm, unsentimental and beautifully-observed book for our times."
The Wren, the Wren (2023) Anne Enright "Sharp, sudden, mischievous, sublime - this is a dazzling novel; a glorious multi-generational novel of tangled relationships, secrets, bodies, sex. Nell must be one of the best young women I've read in recent Irish fiction."
Soldier Sailor (2023) Claire Kilroy "Breathtaking . . . terrifyingly well-observed and articulated, often extremely funny, and there is a pleasure to be found even in the skewering precision of its despair."
Elsewhere (2023) Yan Ge "Precise, surreal and emotionally devastating - the stories in Elsewhere leap between continents and centuries with a fierceness and confidence that makes their abiding loneliness and sense of longing all the more affecting."
Close to Home (2023) Michael Magee "A sharp and humane novel about a young man, and a city, caught in the painful throes of reimagining themselves. It rings with authenticity, and the wisdom of hard-won observation and experience - a hymn to the ways in which art can be a lifeline and an escape. Michael Magee's debut is an important addition to the burgeoning new canon of Belfast literature."
Wandering Souls (2023) Cecile Pin "Clear-hearted and moving, Wandering Souls tells one of the most important stories of our times, and you can feel, as you read, all it has taken Pin to write it."
White Riot (2023) (United Kingdom Trilogy, book 1) Joe Thomas "Stylish and pacy, White Riot throbs with a restless, punky energy, bringing Hackney of the late 70s and early 80s compellingly and disturbingly to life. A full-throated, swaggering roar of a book."
Trespasses (2022) Louise Kennedy "I hardly have words for how viscerally this book affected me, how much it moved me. Pitch-perfect in its evocation of its time and place, unflinching in the rawness of its longing, Trespasses is an extraordinary read - it will break your heart."
Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love (2021) Huma Qureshi "Huma Qureshi writes the inarticulable distances between mothers and daughters, the consuming ache of longing for someone not yet kissed, the invisible, irreparable breaches in friendships or between lovers, with such pitch-perfect precision, such lightness of touch. These are stories of fierce clarity and tenderness - I loved them."
The Fire Starters (2019) Jan Carson "Shimmering with wit, simmering with an incandescent rage, shot through with a seam of wild magic, The Fire Starters is a powerful, disturbing portrait of East Belfast and its people and its hope for the future. I won’t be the only reader to proclaim that, in the best way possible, Jan Carson is on fire."
The Vogue (2018) Eoin McNamee "Told in Eoin McNamee's trademark terse and melancholy prose, as salt-pitted and bleach-boned as the landscape it describes, The Vogue is an eerie, intense, haunted and haunting tale, with an air of chilling loneliness that seems to seep from the pages and into the very room in which you read it."
A Line Made By Walking (2017) Sara Baume "Unflinching, at times uncomfortable, and always utterly compelling, A Line Made By Walking is among the best accounts of grief, loneliness and depression that I have ever read."
(b.1982)
