Bulley and Berry join Faber's 2022 poetry list

Faber has acquired "distinctive" new works by Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Emily Berry for its 2022 poetry list.

Quiet, the debut collection by Bulley (pictured, top), and Unexhausted Time by Berry will both publish in the spring.

Bulley's collection circles around ideas of Black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, "playing at the tensions between the impulse to guard one’s ‘inner life’ and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, ‘your silence will not protect you’". The publisher explained: "The poems teem with grace and dignity, are artful in their shapes, sharp in their intelligence, and possessing of a good ear, finely attuned to the sonics that fascinate and motivate the writing ‘at the lower end of sound'."

Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. She is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets, the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held residencies internationally in the US, Brazil, and the V&A Museum in London. She is currently a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Meanwhile, Berry's Unexhausted Time inhabits a world of dream and dawn, in which thoughts "touch us ‘like soft rain’, and all the elements are brought closer in", the synopsis states. "The collection takes shape in the half-light between the real and the imagined, where everything is lost and yet ‘nothing goes away’. Here life’s innumerable impressions, moods, seasons and déjà vus collect and disarrange themselves, while a glowing, companionable ‘I’ travels the mind’s landscapes in hope of refuge and transformation amid these displaced moments in time."

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Berry's previous collections include 2013's Dear Boy and 2017's Stranger, Baby, both published by Faber.

Faber acquired world all-language rights for Berry’s collection from Peter Straus at RCW, while world English-language rights for Bulley’s Quiet were acquired from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander.

Commenting on both acquisitions, Matthew Hollis, poetry editor, said: "'A circus passed the house', wrote Emily Dickinson, '– still I feel the red in my mind'. I experienced something of the same depth of impression in these resonant and intricate books by Emily Berry (pictured, right) and Victoria Adukwei Bulley. It is an honour to put them before you: each one so rich in its psychological mine and yet so engaged in the world above; each one so expressive in its journey through silence. Emily and Victoria possess distinctive voices that will, I am certain, like the hum of a tuning fork, be felt long after they are heard." 

Both poets will be appearing at a Faber Members event on 27th October, alongside Paul Muldoon, Maurice Riordan and Jack Underwood.

The collections follow a programme of autumn 2021 publishing including new works by Simon Armitage, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Muldoon, Riordan and Underwood, and the release of the debut collections by Ilya Kaminsky (Dancing in Odessa) and Ishion Hutchinson (Far District). The announcement also comes hot on the heels of Faber and Wonderbly's new platform Pagesmith, a service that sees personalised poetry collections printed and delivered to customers.