Prodigal
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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.
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Kayo Chingonyi is a poet, writer and academic. His debut collection of poems, Kumukanda, won the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize, the Roehampton Poetry Prize, the Michael Murphy Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Prize. He is poetry editor of the White Review and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Durham. He lives in Leeds with his wife.
