About
Kayo Chingonyi is a Zambian-born British poet, writer, editor, and academic whose work explores identity, migration, grief, masculinity, and the relationship between cultural inheritance and personal experience. Born in Zambia in 1987, he moved to the United Kingdom at the age of six. His experiences of growing up between two cultures have become important influences on his poetry, which often examines the complicated relationship between memory, belonging, and the places people leave behind. Chingonyi studied English literature at the University of Sheffield before completing a master’s degree in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. His interest in music also plays a significant role in his creative work. Influenced by hip-hop, soul, and British grime, he often approaches poetry through rhythm, sound, and performance, exploring how music can express experiences that ordinary language sometimes struggles to capture. His first full-length poetry collection, Kumukanda (2017), won both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. The collection explores the transition from childhood to adulthood, the loss of his parents, and the cultural distance between his Zambian heritage and British upbringing. His second collection, A Blood Condition (2021), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the Costa Poetry Award. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Alongside his writing, Chingonyi teaches creative writing at Durham University, works as a poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and presents the music and culture podcast Decode. With Prodigal, his first work of nonfiction, he turns to memoir to explore the personal history behind themes that have long informed his poetry: loss, inheritance, cultural identity, and the search for belonging.
