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).

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.

Bryce lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and works as a freelance writer and editor.. Colette Bryce - Victoria and Albert Museum