Colette Bryce

Colette Bryce (born 1970) is a poet, freelance writer and editor. She was a Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003–2005, and a North East Literary Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne 2005–2007. She was the Poetry Editor of Poetry London 2009–2013.

Bryce was born 1970 in Derry, Northern Ireland where she was educated at Thornhill College. Bryce lived in London until 2002 when she moved to Scotland. She moved to the North East of England in 2005.

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 the recent anthologies Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe), and The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe), Forward Book of Poetry 2009 (Forward), Hand in Hand (Faber) and the Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (Penguin, 2010).

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 2004 collection, short-listed for the TS Eliot Award the following year.

A pamphlet, The Observations of Aleksandr Svetlov, appeared from Donut Press in 2007.

Her third collection Self-Portrait in the Dark was published in 2008 and shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2009. It includes the poem Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-Mirror that won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2007.

In 2010, she was one of four people to receive £1,500 from the Society of Authors with the Cholmondely Award for poets.

A pamphlet ″Ballasting the Ark″, written in response to a Leverhulme fellowship at Dove Marine Laboratory in Cullercoats, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry in 2012.

Her 2014 collection ″The Whole & Rain-domed Universe″, which draws on the author’s experience of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, was awarded a special Christopher Ewart-Biggs Award in memory of Seamus Heaney. The book was also short-listed for Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection, The Costa Poetry Award, and The Roehampton Poetry Prize.