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. In 2012 he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was Associate Poet at the ICA in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017) won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for a Costa Poetry Award. It was also shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, before joining Durham University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. His most recent collection is A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. Author © Smart Banda
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