Kayo Chingonyi – A Blood Condition

Description

The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi.

Kayo Chingonyi’s remarkable second collection follows the course of a ‘blood condition’ as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history, can collapse within a body.

With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances — of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go — and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.

‘A Blood Condition is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year’ Guardian, Books of the Year 2021

‘A thing of beauty. It’s a pleasure to read such a sure and strident second outing from one of our most celebrated young poets’ Diana Evans

‘An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading’ Telegraph

About the Author

Kayo Chingonyi FRSL was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and of The Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by The Poetry Society and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester before joining Durham University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode on Spotify, poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and his most recent collection A Blood Condition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.