Birth Place: | Essex, England |
Education: | Royal Holloway, University of London |
Occupation: | Poet |
Notable Works: | Quiet (2022) |
Awards: | Folio Prize |
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born Ghanaian poet.[1]
Bulley is of Ghanaian heritage, born and brought up in Essex, England. In 2019, she was awarded a Techne[2] scholarship for doctoral work at Royal Holloway, University of London.
An alumna of The Complete Works poetry mentoring programme initiated by Bernardine Evaristo, Bulley has held residencies internationally in the US, Brazil, and at the V&A.
Bulley's writing has been published in works including Rising Stars: New Young Voices in Poetry (Otter-Barry Books, 2017,), Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe Books, 2017,), Granta,[3] The Guardian,[4] and The White Review.[5]
She produced the Mother Tongues intergenerational project, in which poets worked with their mothers to translate their poetry into their mother-tongues.[6] [7]
Bulley's 2017 debut pamphlet Girl B was published by Akashic Books and included in the collection New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set .[8] Karen McCarthy Woolf called it "a probing, thoughtful, and quietly exhilarating debut".[9]
Her first book collection, Quiet (2022), was praised in The Times Literary Supplement as "clever and capacious poems"[10] and described in The Guardian as "mark[ing] the arrival of a major poetic talent".[11]
Bulley won a 2018 Eric Gregory Award.[12]
Quiet was shortlisted for the 2022 T. S. Eliot Prize[13] and won the 2023 Folio Prize for poetry.[14] Bulley also won the 2023 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize for Quiet.[15]