I write poetry, essays and non-fiction.

My poetry collection Luxe was published by Salt in 2013. My second collection Isn’t Forever was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card choice. My debut non-fiction book Arrangements in Blue was published in spring 2023 in the UK by Jonathan Cape, Liveright in the US and Rizzoli in Italy. After growing up in Kent and the North East, I’ve lived and worked in London since 2001.

I’m on Twitter and Instagram @msamykey and Blue Sky @amykey.bsky.social. My substack is So Glad I’m Me.

Praise for Arrangements in Blue – named a book of the year in The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Irish Times and Granta

‘The book I’ve been waiting for my entire life’
DOLLY ALDERTON, author of Everything I Know About Love

‘Marks an important shift in ideas about intimacy’
OBSERVER

‘The harbinger of real talent’
SUNDAY TIMES

‘Deeply moving… A study of love – platonic and romantic, lost and found – Amy’s memoir demonstrates the power of music on forming a self.’
i-D, Books to be Excited for in 2023

A beautiful, painful, liberating book. Amy Key writes with such tenderness and insight about a life without romantic love at its centre, exacting as to its impoverishments, exultant over its many and unexpected riches.
Olivia Laing, author of Crudo

Amy Key writes with rare integrity, courage and style about the pursuit of love – it’s somehow both consoling and provoking, and a beautiful and necessary book.
Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

A gorgeous manifesto for a solo life, the power of music and friendships and a reckoning with the possibilities of love and fulfilment.
Sinéad Gleeson, author of CONSTELLATIONS

In Arrangements in Blue Amy Key finds a language, searing in its depth and honesty, for desire, shame, grief and, crucially, for compassion, for the peace that comes of holding on and letting go in the same instant.
Kayo Chingonyi, A Blood Condition

Profound and poetic, vulnerable yet brave, I devoured Amy Key’s memoir about love, loss, memory and hope. An incredible writer, a stunning debut.
Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls

There is a whole life pulsing within these pages, written with both clarity and eloquence, a glittering brightness that glints like stars in a navy velvet sky. A book to be read in astonishment and in admiration. Bewitching.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

An exquisite book whose beauty sweetly stung me. Amy writes just like Joni sings – her voice is disarming, immersive, sunlit, charged with ecstatic feminine power.
May-Lan Tan, author of Things to Make and Break

Arrangements in Blue took my breath away. Amy Key has the uncanny ability to distil a feeling into an image of total beauty and clarity; the language is crystalline, the book as a whole radically tender. Even in the process of reading it for the first time I knew it would be a book I would return to again and again.
Sophie Mackintosh, author of Blue Ticket

Amy Key’s extraordinary Arrangements in Blue isn’t merely a commentary on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, but something bolder, more personal and shape-shafting, in line with Joni’s own art in that it takes no starting point for granted. It makes itself up on its own terms. An intimate, absorbing inquiry of what self-care means to a life, and how to go forward when you put the map of romantic attachment to the side.
Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

From grief to anger to full-throttled joy, Amy Key hits every note of feeling with perfect pitch. Arrangements in Blue grows out of a poet’s obsession with Joni Mitchell’s iconic album, but at its heart this book is a brave and brilliant exploration of how one woman lives both alone and alongside romance. An absolutely gorgeous work.
Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book

You can follow me on twitter and instagram @msamykey. For work enquiries please contact my agent Angelique Tran Van Sang at Felicity Bryan Associates. If you’d like to get in touch direct, please use this form: