Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born Ghanaian poet. Her debut poetry book Quiet won the Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2023.
Early life and education
Bulley is of Ghanaian heritage, born and brought up in Essex, England. In 2019, she was awarded a Techne 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.
Writing
Bulley's writing has been published in Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, as well as in anthologies, including Rising Stars: New Young Voices in Poetry and Ten: Poets of the New Generation, edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf.She produced the Mother Tongues intergenerational project, in which poets worked with their mothers to translate their poetry into their mother-tongues.
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, edited by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes. Karen McCarthy Woolf called it "a probing, thoughtful, and quietly exhilarating debut".
Bulley's first book collection, Quiet, was praised in The Times Literary Supplement for containing "clever and capacious poems" and described in The Guardian as "mark the arrival of a major poetic talent". Quiet was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize.