Kayo Chingonyi, United Kingdom

Kayo Chingonyi, born 1987 in Zambia, attracted great attention with his first poetry collection Kumukanda (Chatto&Windus, 2017). It became the Guardian and Telegraph Book of the Year and won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2018. In it Chingonyi deals with such subjects as loss, otherness and being black in England. The rhyme and metre of his poetry its speech tempo and rhythm are derived from rap. Chingonyi has been a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is currently Poetry Editor of the magazine The White Review and a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham.

Publication:
Kumukanda. Chatto & Windus, 2017