Colette Bryce



Colette Bryce (born 1970) is a critically acclaimed poet from Derry, Northern Ireland.

Bryce lived in London until 2002 when she moved to Scotland, followed by a move to the North East of England in 2005. She was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003–2005, and North East Literary Fellow (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) from 2005–2007. Bryce lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and works as a freelance writer and editor.

Her works
Bryce's first published work was included in the 1995 volume Anvil New Poets, ed. Carol Ann Duffy, which also introduced the work of poets Kate Clanchy and Alice Oswald, among others. That year she won an Eric Gregory Award. Her poetry appears in recent anthologies Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe), and The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe), Forward Book of Poetry 2009 (Forward) and Hand in Hand (Faber). She is current Poetry Editor at Poetry London.

Her first collection The Heel of Bernadette, published in 2000 by Picador, won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and the Strong Award for new Irish poets.

In 2003, Bryce won the National Poetry Competition for her poem, The Full Indian Rope Trick, which became the title-poem of her second collection, short-listed for the TS Eliot Award the following year.

Her third collection Self-Portrait in the Dark was published in 2008. It includes the poem Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-Mirror that won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2007.

A pamphlet, The Observations of Aleksandr Svetlov, appeared from Donut Press in 2007. She was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2009 for her Self-Portrait in the Dark collection.