Luke Kennard at Manchester Poetry Library
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
We’re looking forward to hearing from Birmingham-based poet, critic and fiction writer Luke Kennard, the third guest to appear in Manchester Poetry Library’s events programme.
His collection Notes on the Sonnets was published by Penned in the Margins in 2021 and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection – the ‘anarchic’ response to 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets was followed the same year by Bad Sermons (Broken Sleep Books), a loose, anarchic sequence, described by the author as ‘a thriller in 23 parts’.
Luke Kennard won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2005 for his debut collection, of prose poems, The Solex Brothers. In 2007, his second, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, made him the youngest poet to be shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection; its “sequel”, The Migraine Hotel, a combination of verse and prose poetry, came out (also with Salt Publishing) in 2009. A Lost Expression was published by Salt in 2012 to critical acclaim and his fifth collection, Cain, was published in 2016 by Penned in the Margins and shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize.
He has also published the pamphlets Planet Shaped Horse (Nine Arches, 2011), The Necropolis Boat (Holdfire Press, 2012), which won the Poetry Book Society’s pamphlet choice, and Truffle Hound (Verve Poetry Press, 2018).
In 2014, Luke Kennard was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once every ten years list of poets “expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade”.
He is also the author of the experimental short story Holophin (Penned in the Margins, 2012), which which won the Saboteur Novella Award, and the novels The Transition – a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize – and The Answer to Everything (4th Estate, 2021).
He has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, publishing on prose poetry and absurdism in contemporary poetry, and his literary criticism has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry London and others.
After Luke reads from a selection of his poetry, he’ll be in conversation with poet Nikolai Duffy of Manchester Writing School, chatting all things poetry and writing. Come armed with questions!
