The judges described Scary Monsters as a “work of beautifully composed genius”. “This is a book that troubles and disquiets, dazzles and delights, and with lively wit and intelligence, will also make you laugh darkly,” the judges added. Anthony Cummins in the Guardian described the book as “slyly intelligent”. Those three are right after each other, but each with a space in between. And I find myself wondering: what’s the space? What’s the tension in between these lines doing? For whom is the war over? And who can go early to bed and curl up with a book? For whom is it occurring in a way that is giving a depth of peace? And for whom is it working in a way where their experience is being quietened, erased, silenced? “[A]s in the British are / so polite /.” And then “placid” and “placated,”“nuanced” and “complicated”. Her writing has been published in works including Rising stars: new young voices in poetry (Otter-Barry Books, 2017, ISBN 9781910959374), Ten: poets of the new generation (Bloodaxe Books, 2017, ISBN 9781780373829), Granta, [7] The Guardian, [8] and The White Review. [9] Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a writer and film-maker of Ghanaian heritage, born and raised in Essex, England, and an alumna of the thriving artistic development project Barbican Young Poets. Published this month, her first full-length collection, Quiet, moves between anger and tenderness, scientific curiosity and raw grief, full-on noisiness and meditative quiet. I didn’t really know that being a writer was an option, or what that looked like in reality, maybe because I didn’t know any writers or anybody who knew one – so I never decided upon being one. I’m still realising that it’s possible even now. Before I could write I would tell stories. I have a tape recording of myself (made by my mother and sister) making up stories at about the age of three.

Eric Gregory Awards: Past winners: 2018". The Society of Authors. 8 May 2020 . Retrieved 6 February 2023. I was blown away by Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet– she’s a writer of staggering intellect, grace and style, and these poems are balletic in their elegance, powerful both when they whisper and when they yell.” —Joanna Lee, The White Review And then it moves to social. Looks at the streets, and who gets a quiet, “clean, tree-lined street”? And who gets a library, a well-resourced one? And who gets to go to a “good, outstanding school”? What’s the quietude about that? And then it continues. To my mind, when she says:Bulley is also the director of MOTHER TONGUES, an intergenerational poetry, film and translation project exploring the indigenous linguistic heritages of poets of colour, supported by Autograph and Arts Council England. She explores this territory in the recordings shared here with poems testing the various mediations of language on identity, the bridging and estrangements, through the use of form and dialect and the interplay of distance and closeness. Cane, Corn & Gully as I love the fluidity of what Safiya is doing with dance and poetry. I’ve loved reading Constructing A Nervous System, and I adore Zaffar Kunial’s work too. I have also been meaning to read work by both Sheila Heti and NoViolet Bulawayo for some time now. Adukwei Bulley is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory award. The judges said Quiet was “a quiet revolution of a book – subtle, supple and serious”. A second-person speaker allows the poet to hold an insecure adolescent self with clear-eyed tenderness: There are poems of love and friendship. I love the poem “Stephanie;” walking by a house where a friend used to live, she recalls how they would walk to the park at night: “What is a friend/but someone to sit with/on the swings/out in the darkness.”

Bulley here focuses on sound. Rhythm. Through the noise, diagetic and non-diagetic, she explores the vacuum in which meanings are contained. How those meanings can explode and create structures, forms. Even give nothingness a sound. She can even give silence a rounded feeling, a soul. Rumens, Carol (6 June 2022). "Poem of the week: Air by Victoria Adukwei Bulley". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 February 2023. Tender and true, complex and profound, Quiet is a beautiful balancing act of a book – a debut that brings Adukwei Bulley fully formed, starting something,” they added.only nations, these girls, cacao-cored & peppercorn pin-curled, decided to call themselves beautiful. I remember years ago when people began to say, “not funny as in haha, but funny as in weird.” And realizing that probably different communities of people in different languages have been saying things like that for a very long time. It’s easily said these days in social media, and I love what Victoria Adukwei Bulley has done here in terms of saying “not quiet as in quiet but” as the title and then unfolding. I think it’s 31 unfoldings that she does here. And they’re in, to my mind anyway, different categories. You know, the first ones are peaceful, slow to anger, shy, sulking, sullen, nice. They’re complicated enough, but they’re relatively ordinary. Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s stunning poems draw you in with their melodious versatility, intellect and dexterity; perfectly embody the political through the personal; and are freedom-loving shapeshifters constantly changing form and animating ideas and language to surprising effect. This is her debut collection, but she arrives fully formed.” —Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

images, compelling observations and a nomadic sense of questioning, while honouring the concept of silence and the ways it plays out in one's interior life. TheseAt the ceremony it was also announced that the prize is looking for new sponsorship, as Rathbones has decided to step down following seven years as sponsor. Clever and capacious poems ... Bulley invites us in as she turns everything – intimate and secret, precious and precarious – inside out... Bulley's collection may begin quietly, but by the end her voice is clearly heard." - Times Literary Supplement Her first book collection Quiet (2022) was praised in the TLS as "clever and capacious poems". [5] and described in The Guardian as "mark[ing] the arrival of a major poetic talent". [6]