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Biography

Juliane Okot Bitek writes poetry, fiction, and scholarly essays. Her first collection of poetry, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry, and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. It was shortlisted for the Alberta Book Publishing Awards, the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Pat Lowther Award. Her second collection, A is for Acholi was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and was a finalist for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. It won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.  Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Juliane's first novel, We, the Kindling, was published by Alchemy (an imprint of Penguin Random House), to critical acclaim. It was long listed for the 2025 Giller Prize for Fiction, and a finalist for the 2025 Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize. We, the Kindling was named one of Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2025, and CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2025. It won the 2026 Trillium Book Award. Juliane is joint-appointed in the Gender Studies Department, where she teaches in the Black Studies Program. She is also affiliated with the Department of Cultural Studies.

Juliane’s most recent journal articles and contributions include:

• "dis place: on the Second Emancipation Day in Canada. small axe 41 (2023)
• "Meaning of a Song," Unsettling Translation: River in an Ocean. Trace Press, 2023
• "Back at You, Conrad!" Messy Ethics ib Human Rights Work. Eds Shayna Plaut, Neil Bilotta, Lara Rosenoff-Gauvin and Maritza Felices-Luna. UBC Press, 2023
• "Colonial Intent as Treachery: A Poetic Response," Critical African Studies Vol14, Issue 1 (2022)
• “What Choices Between Nightmares: Intersecting Local, Global and Intimate Stories of Pain in Peacebuilding” Peace Building and the Arts (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2020)
• “Conversations at the Crossroads: Indigenous and Black Writers Talk”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (2020)
• “States of Being: The Poet & Scholar as a Black, African, & Diasporic Woman”, Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy: Teaching, Learning and Researching While Black, edited by Awad Ibrahim et al (U of Toronto Press, 2022).

A is for Acholi a poetry collection (Wolsak and Wynn 2022) was shortlisted for the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the 2023 Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes, and it won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Her most recent collection of poetry is Song & Dread (Talonbooks 2022).

She is an Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Program at ���ϳԹ���Դ, joint-appointed in Gender Studies and English.

Research Interests

African literature; Black Studies; Creative Writing (especially poetry); Black theory; Black Diasporic literature; oral traditions; war and trauma literature; history and cultural memory; Black and Indigenous cultural relations

Selected Publications

We, the Kindling (Alchemy, 2025)

Jury citation:
“We, the Kindling is a poet’s novel in the very best way: the stark music of powerful individual voices that resonate with trauma, resilience, and tradition. This is a history of stories, insightful testimonies that insist in their frank beauty that history is not forgotten but is transmuted into the most fundamental questions, the topography of “a map of the places we’ve been… a map you won’t find on any atlas.” Otoniya J. Okot Bitek writes with mastery of lives forged in war; a testament to the strength of these uncompromising and empowering witnesses, smouldering with life and hard-won possibility.”—2025 Atwood Gibson Prize Jury (Gary Barwin, Ali Bryan, and Jasmine Sealy) 

Song and Dread, (Talon Books, 2023)

Rife with the paradoxical forces of boredom and intensity, the early days of COVID-19 passed under an inescapable pall. The poems of Song & Dread seek quietude, order, refuge, and space within that shroud. They remind us of community, connectedness, and what is inherently shared. Here, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek becomes a record keeper, observing the contradictory, symbiotic relationship between the quotidian and the extraordinary. These are works of their time, while remembering an existence outside it. With a keen eye, Okot Bitek documents the ways the strange can become normalized when there is no other option.

A is for Acholi, (Wolsak & Wynn, 2022)

A Is for Acholi is a sweeping collection exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver. Playfully upending English and scholarly notation Otoniya J. Okot Bitek rearranges the alphabet, hides poems in footnotes and slips stories into superscripts. The poet opens up ways of rethinking history as she rewrites both the 1862 contact of the Acholi people with the British and the racist texts of Joseph Conrad, while also searching for a way to live on lands that are fraught with the legacies of colonization, similar to her ancestral homeland. With writing that is lyric, layered and deeply felt, the poems in A Is for Acholi unfold maps of history, culture and identity, tracing a route to a present where the poet dreams of writing a world without empire.
 

100 Days, (University of Alberta Press, 2016)

For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem—each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father—the poet Okot p'Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop.