Lucy Holme

Originally from Kent, Lucy Holme has lived in Cork, Ireland for well over a decade. A former private yacht chief stewardess and wine sommelier, her first poetry chapbook Temporary Stasis from Broken Sleep Books was described as a 'haunting exploration of the feminine and the marine' and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her recently published nonfiction essay collection Blue Diagonals was described by The Stinging Fly's nonfiction editor Roisin Kiberd as 'a truly kaleidoscopic memoir, told with nostalgia, wit and poetic intensity'. Her work features in PN Review, The Manchester Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, Southword, Banshee and The Stinging Fly amongst others. She has been shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Award, The Brotherton Prize, The Mairtín Crawford Award, The Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition, Southword’s Literary Essay Competition, The Wales Poetry Prize and won the Southword Editor's Award and the Cúirt New Writing Prize for Poetry 2024.  She is currently undergoing a PhD at University College Cork where she also teaches creative nonfiction and poetry and is hard at work on her first novel. 

Recent publication: 

BLUE DIAGONALS (Broken Sleep Books, September 2024)

An intimate and powerful exploration of love, loss, and healing. Holme's evocative prose transports the reader through a landscape of raw emotion, drawing on personal history and memory to illuminate the fragility and resilience of the human spirit. This remarkable debut blends memoir and narrative with a compelling depth, capturing the complexities of grief and the struggle to find meaning in the aftermath. With stunning clarity and grace, Blue Diagonals is a profound meditation on the intersections of life, death, and the possibility of renewal. A moving, unforgettable read.

PRAISE for Blue Diagonals:

'Haunting, melancholic, and charged with the glamour of yacht parties and Monégasque summers, Blue Diagonals is a beguiling account of one author’s many lives, lived in different places. It’s a truly kaleidoscopic memoir, told with nostalgia, wit and poetic intensity'. Roisin Kiberd

'In these intriguing and intricate essays, Lucy Holme explores how to tell our lives back to ourselves as stories of wonder and pain and joy.' Emilie Pine

'Lyrical, wry and written with enormous tenderness, Blue Diagonals is a masterful fusion of experimental poetics and heartfelt storytelling. Opening on the neon cityscape of Miami dive bars and strip malls, this fantastic collection takes us on a journey from the US to the ice-cool marble mansions of Monaco and the slow beauty of Cork city. In essays intercut with poems and textual experiments, Lucy Holme presents us with an expansive space as we follow one young woman’s emerging subjectivity against a backdrop of the luxury yachting world. Taking the tides as subject but also form, lives, friendships and love affairs ebb and flow across the pages. Inventive, heart-catching and beautifully made, Blue Diagonals is an unmissable read.'   Mariah Whelan

'I found reading these essays akin to stepping onto a hotel balcony while on holiday, of being flooded with the blue sensations of sea and sky, with strange sounds and olfactory seductions. These are the moments when you become unmoored from everyday realities and receptive to the kind of truths that you cannot afterwards unhear. This is a stunning collection: sensual in its imagery, bursting with insight, full of sidelong glances down vistas of great depth; daring, moving, deeply affecting.' Cathy Sweeney

'Most of us are playing it safe. Lucy Holme isn’t. Not in how she chose her path in life and not in how she writes about it, either. Blue Diagonals brings you into a world at once as glitzy and glamorous as it is seedy and nauseating. Amid great personal upheaval, Lucy Holme is our astute guide to a world that is brocaded and coddled, unlike the one she and her friends inhabit. A kaleidoscopic journey of personal development, Blue Diagonals forces us to confront unhappiness in its many guises, in order to ‘navigate our way together out of the shadows cast by this chimerical existence’.  David Toms

'In a delicate sequence of linked vignettes, Lucy Holme sings a deep-felt ode to a formative search for self. From the soul-numbing mystery of mismatched intimacy, to the painful joy of personal wisdom hard-won, Blue Diagonals draws a glistening portrait of the necessary costs and unknowable rewards of starting again, and again.' Cristín Leach

'In Blue Diagonals, Lucy Holme casts her net wide but also deep. In layers of exquisite detail, she navigates us to multiple locations while fearlessly exploring grief, love, motherhood and missed connections.' Eimear Ryan