JJ Bola

JJ Bola is a Kinshasa-born, British-French poet, writer and educator, based in London. He has written three collections of poetry as well as two novels, No Place to Call Home and The Selfless Act Of Breathing (2021), and a non-fiction book about masculinity and patriarchy for young people, Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined (2019). His writing explores themes of displacement and belonging.

Life and work Bola was born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

His debut novel, No Place to Call Home (published in 2017 by Own It!), is about the journey of a family coming from Congo to the UK to seek asylum as refugees, which Bola said "tackles the questions of belonging and identity, and this feeling of ... how there isn't a place for you but also how communities come to form themselves away from the places they feel they belong to and how they survive in different spaces and some of the issues and interactions that go around that." As he has described himself: "I am a refugee with a British passport." In 2018, his three poetry books – Elevate, Daughter of the Sun, and WORD – were published in one volume titled Refuge, which was read out in the British House of Commons during Refugee Week that year. He was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018 and held a discussion with Cate Blanchett.

In 2019, Bola published Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined, a "brutally honest" work of non-fiction that draws upon his own experience growing up as it "guides the reader with a voice, both calm and matter-of-fact, through the ways specific kinds of masculinities have been distorted into violence. Within the first few pages, he asks the question his younger self asked, 'what does it actually mean to be a man?', the question 'that we're not supposed to ask'." Red Pepper concluded that, as a text written for boys and young men, "this is a book that should be in the library of every secondary school in the country."

Bola's second novel was The Selfless Act of Breathing (2021). Reviewing it in The Guardian, Michael Donkor acknowledged that its "conceptual concern with the limited routes available for black people to find meaningful release from systemic racism is, without question, important and emotive", while suggesting that the novel is "compromised by a brand of lyricism that distracts rather than illuminates." The Observer noted: "Bola's ear for rhythm and cadence is sharp, and he lets characters soliloquise as if acing a poetry slam, their diction inflected with the street and the pulpit as they riff on cities, black history, police brutality." Litro magazine concluded: "JJ Bola has succeeded in writing a novel that's not only a pleasure to read but is a necessary navigation through our society." The author himself has said: "The first thing I'm hoping for is just empathy. I want the reader to sit with this person and not think about fixing them or saving them."

Bola spent many years as a youth worker, working with young people with behavioural and mental health problems. The joint winners of the inaugural prize were the Cameroonian author Musih Tedji Xaviere, whose debut novel about two lesbian students, These Letters End in Tears, was published by Jacaranda Books in 2024, and Bhavika Govil.

Publications Novels No Place to Call Home: Love, Loss, Belonging. Own It!, 2017. . The Selfless Act Of Breathing. Dialogue, 2021. .

Non-fiction Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined. Outspoken. Pluto Press, 2019. .

Poetry Elevate (2012) Daughter of the Sun (2014) Word (2015) Refuge (2018) – a collection, comprising Word, Daughter of the Sun and Elevate

Publications with contributions by Bola Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space. London: Trapeze, 2019. Edited by Derek Owusu. . Bola contributes a chapter, "Rapper, Actor, Athlete – Other".