Prodigal

The extraordinary memoir from Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet, Kayo Chingonyi.

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

1993. Shortly after his father’s death, six-year-old Kayo is smuggled out of Zambia onto a plane bound for Newcastle. Soon he learns that his father died from an HIV-related illness, a fate suffered by many Zambians, and later, he becomes a young carer to his mother as the virus takes her, too.

2017. Now a celebrated young poet, Kayo receives a message from a cousin 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 of 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 the immigrant experience is often one of filling in the gaps.

Reviews

Praise for A Blood Condition:

‘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, Guardian

‘The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you feel altered by it’ Andrew O'Hagan, New Statesman

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

‘Has a dignity that honours the past without indulging in any overflow of personal feeling … Chingonyi's authentic, reined-in passions are stirring… [His] poems grow out of gaps, out of the moments when nothing more can be done. The dead cannot be recovered, time cannot be reclaimed, the damage to the river is likely to be permanent, but a poem can be written and take its quietly powerful stand’ Observer

‘There is thrilling formal accomplishment on display in these poems… poignant and moving… there are brilliant evocations of the north of England’ Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society

‘Kayo Chingonyi's second book, A Blood Condition, is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year. His ability to blend music, grief and yearning is unmatched’ Rishi Dastidar, Guardian

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.