Her debut novel, Where They Were Missed, which details a young girl's
passage towards adulthood in 1970s and 1980s Belfast and Donegal against the sectarian tensions of the Troubles and the gloom of a broken
home and bereavement, was longlisted for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize 2006, and received glowing reviews from Vogue to the Times Literary Supplement.

Where They Were Missed lucidly recreates six-year-old Saoirse's innocent world of ice-pops, dolls, playtime with her little sister Daisy, bedtime stories about Celtic heroines, the rhythm of drums sounding on the Twelfth of July, and the plangent racket of helicopters overhead.

Saoirse (the Irish for 'freedom') is the child of a mixed marriage, her mother a Catholic and an alcoholic, and her father an RUC officer from Sandy Row.

During the novel's second part, when Saoirse reaches 16 and moves to Gwebarra Sands to live with relatives, she begins to reflect more deeply upon the burden of her past, memories of heated bigotry in Belfast, and about what it might mean to be Northern Irish, wedged between nationalist and unionist allegiances.

Centrally, the novel ponders Saoirse's tentative feeling that "maybe you can never really get away from where you come from".

The notion of one's birthplace as crucial to shaping identity and outlook is also explored in Leaves, Caldwell's first play, which was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 2006.

This laconic drama interrogates a young Belfast woman's depression and attempted suicide, and her bewildered family's efforts to cope.

On some levels, the play intimates that an upbringing in conflict-torn Belfast may have planted the seeds for adult psychological trauma.

For a writer just shy of her 27th birthday, Caldwell's ability to move
easily between literary forms is enviable, and her mature, controlled handling of difficult subject matter, nothing short of remarkable.

"I try to write life as it really is, and I'm particularly interested in loss, where one person ends and another begins, and so I write a lot about siblings and close, interconnected relationships" says Lucy.

"Whether it's working out what love is, or the distances between people,
or a sense of the unknowability of others, I'm fascinated by relationships and I think this is the primary concern of my writing.

"But, even more basically, my writing, like most writing, is about trying to imaginatively understand and recreate the lives of other people, to empathise with them, to imagine what their lives are like,
from what they believe in or what drives them, right down to the minutiae of what they had for breakfast and what clothes they wear.

"Writing is really about trying to imagine what it would be like to be
someone else.

"And it's also about compassion. The second a piece of writing begins to be didactic, or impose a moral judgement on a character, is when it loses the ambivalence that is necessary in successful writing.

"The audience or the reader need to be allowed to make their own minds
up."

Understated ambiguity is a skill Caldwell seems to have mastered.

While Where They Were Missed manages to depict sectarianism in Belfast through subtle vignettes, recalled in a child's slangy simplicity, refusing to take sides or point fingers, Leaves similarly offers no easy answers on suicidal behaviour or the legacy of The Troubles.

As a Northern Irish writer, it was perhaps inevitable that Caldwell would use her art as a means of interrogating local bigotries – The Troubles never seem too far away for most of our native contemporary
writers – Caldwell insists that she has not allowed the fact that she
comes from Belfast to dictate the subject matter of her work.

"I am from Northern Ireland, I can never get away from that, and I am
very conscious of writing as part of a Northern Irish literary tradition.

"Growing up with the circumstances of The Troubles as a backdrop does shape you and inform you on a very deep level, and so I felt The Troubles should be very much a part of the fabric of my novel, but I was adamant they would not be its focal point."

It is notable that The Troubles can inform the work of a writer so young.

Caldwell was born in 1981, yet the psychological imprint of the turmoil of the 1970s infuses her work, so that one begins to wonder if anxieties about writing as part of a Northern Irish literary tradition
made her feel compelled to examine the same ground of local political
conflict that has proven such fertile material for Northern Irish
novelists from Glenn Patterson to Nick Laird.

"I have always been interested in myth, in history, in cultural memory, and in how where you come from makes you who you are," she said.

"So as a Northern Irish writer I feel that my work will always engage,
somehow, with what it means or might mean to be Northern Irish.".

Whether probing the difficult question of national identity, the pain of loss, or the too-close-forcomfort strain of sibling relationships, Caldwell is a disciplined, rigorous writer, with an unwinking intelligence, and an unswerving ability to tell a good story.

It is for these reasons rather than the pertinent topicality of much of her work to date, that Caldwell is set to make her mark on the canon of local literature.