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Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is the author of two pamphlets, and a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize, the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Prize. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, and an Associate Poet at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He has performed his work at festivals and events around the world, is Poetry Editor for The White Review, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.
Chingonyi's poetic voice finds its full-throated maturity... Deep introspection becomes the vulnerable and brave heart of the book, rendered into jewel-like poems in Origin Myth ... An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading -- Dzifa Benson * Telegraph * A Blood Condition is 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, *Summer Reads of 2021* * A Blood Condition has a dignity that honours the past without indulging in any overflow of personal feeling. Dignity is an interesting quality in a writer - it cannot be faked without presenting as pomposity. Chingonyi's authentic, reined-in passions are stirring... Chingonyi's 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 -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * A deep thread of loss runs through these poems, and an attempt to reintegrate a past that spans Zambia, Newcastle and London... These fine poems weigh their sorrows carefully, reminding us how best we might carry a well of myth / in the pit of our pith -- Aingeal Clare * Guardian * 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 *
