09 April,
Workshop /
Kayo Chingonyi: You Are Here: Writing and Walking
Wednesday, 09 April 2025, 1:00pm
Bank of Ireland Theatre, O’Donoghue Centre, University of Galway / €65
Book NowJoin award-winning poet and editor Kayo Chingonyi in an exploration of the possibilities of mixing text and image to form cartographical writing drawn from the particular sensory resonances of a place. In the first half of the workshop we’ll look at several examples of place writing and discuss. In the second half, we’ll briefly explore our immediate surroundings to make images and capture notes before working on writing drawn from these explorations. Participants should dress for the weather and bring a device capable of making images (a phone will do but sketch pads and instant cameras are also welcome). If you have particular access needs, please be in touch so that the session can be adapted accordingly.
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.
