[5][1] He was a basketball player as a teenager, competing in national-level tournaments;[3][5] not having a British passport, he could not travel to international competitions and was unable to respond to interest from universities in America.

[4][5] He won a Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship to study at Birkbeck, University of London (2017), earning an MA degree.

[9] 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.

"[12] 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.

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.

"[14] 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.