Lucy Caldwell

Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish novelist and playwright born in Belfast in 1981. She was educated at Cambridge and has written widely across prose fiction and drama. Her early novels include Where They Were Missed (2006) and The Meeting Point (2011), followed by Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Stranger (2016), a collection of stories, and Intimacies (2021), a further collection. These Days (2022), set during the Belfast Blitz of April and May 1941 and following two sisters in a middle-class unionist household, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2023. The novel was praised for its meticulous historical research and its exploration of female experience and the choices forced on women during wartime. Caldwell has described the novel as an act of recovery for forgotten civilian histories of Belfast. Her plays include Leaves (2006), Guardians (2007), and Multitudes (2015), staged at the National Theatre. She has also edited the anthologies Being Various: New Irish Short Stories and Resist: Stories of Uprising. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.