10 April,
Poetry /
Kayo Chingonyi: Prodigal
Thursday, 10 April 2025, 2:30pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €12.00 | €10.00
Book NowAcclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi joins us to present a preview of his extraordinary memoir, Prodigal. After his father’s death from an HIV-related illness, six-year-old Kayo was smuggled out of Zambia onto a plane bound for Newcastle. In Prodigal Kayo takes us on the journey of his return to Zambia 25 years later, the complicated emotions of losing both his parents, and the challenge of writing your future when you don’t fully comprehend your past. This 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.
Kayo Chingonyi FRSL was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and of The Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by The Poetry Society 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. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester before joining Durham University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He was writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode on Spotify, is poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and his most recent collection A Blood Condition 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. His first long form prose work, a memoir entitled Prodigal, is forthcoming from 4th Estate.
