Prodigal

‘A searing feat of grace and tenderness’ OCEAN VUONG, author of The Emperor of Gladness

The extraordinary memoir of grief and belonging from Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet, Kayo Chingonyi.

Did leaving begin the hold that writing would have over my life as I wrote into this most expansive of absences?

1993. Shortly after his father’s death, six-year-old Kayo leaves Zambia with his mother on a plane bound for a new life in Newcastle. Later, he learns that his father died from a HIV-related illness, a fate suffered by many Zambians, and some time afterwards, he becomes a young carer to his mother as the virus takes her too.

2016. Now a celebrated young poet, Kayo receives a message from a relative in Zambia he has not heard from in almost 25 years. He realises it is time to go back.

In Prodigal, Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi tells the story of that return and the winding journey that led him there. He reflects on the guilt and shame at the stigma of his parents' deaths, the uncertainty of a fraught coming-of-age, and reckoning with the challenge of writing his future when he didn't fully know his past. What emerges is a joyous tribute to the healing power of music, poetry and love, and a deeply moving account of how, in seeking to better understand those we love, we might also come to know ourselves and what it is to be human.

‘If you ever felt out of place wherever you are, Prodigal will speak to you – and stay with you for a long time’ RISHI DASTIDAR, author of Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak

Reviews

Praise for Prodigal:

‘Prodigal is a searing feat of grace and tenderness. It is hard to write about love of any kind, but perhaps most precarious is to write about the difficult and vexed love one has for one's parents. Chingonyi doesn't make it look easy. He does something even rarer: he makes it seem inevitable, as if the only way to know anything worth knowing is to never look away’ Ocean Vuong, author of The Emperor of Gladness

‘A quiet quest for belonging and acceptance, Prodigal radiates a profound self-knowledge, written with the cool insight, assurance and forensic style we’ve come to expect from Kayo Chingonyi’s poetry. Pain here is transmuted into something glittering and brilliant, but also comforting; there is a path through trauma to something better. If you ever felt out of place wherever you are, Prodigal will speak to you – and stay with you for a long time’ Rishi Dastidar, author of Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak

About the author

Kayo Chingonyi FRSL is a poet, writer, and editor. His poetry collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and is now a set text on the IGCSE syllabus. His second collection, A Blood Condition, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize, Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester before joining Durham University where he is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing. He is poetry editor at Bloomsbury, overseeing a list which encompasses the breadth and dynamism of contemporary Anglophone poetry. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.