Prodigal
Will be published approx. on 11. February 2027
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-00-849796-5 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 141 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
270 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-00-849796-5 (9780008497965)
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Person
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.