The Book of Jonah

Kennard’s distinctive voice – surreal, funny, anxious, always overthinking, and cringingly self-deprecating – has made him one of the most widely liked and imitated British poets under forty – Tristram Fane Saunders * The Times Literary Supplement *
Kennard is an overachieving poet, the youngest ever finalist for a Forward Prize back in 2007; his work combines accessibility with formal daring and a twist of surrealism * The Guardian *
Kennard … has a poet’s ear for noticing the electric in the quotidian * The Guardian *
Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking “aren’t knives fascinating … and hearts, my god!” whilst everything slowly goes black – Caroline Bird
Brilliant … Deadly serious in the way only the playfully comic can be, the poems here are liable to leave you both smiling and wincing in the same breath – Rishi Dastidar * The Telegraph *
‘A fun, testing read – rather like being regaled at the pub by a tipsy Theology professor’ – Telegraph, Books of the Year – Books of the Year * Telegraph *
My standout poetry read of the year. A playful, and frequently profound reimaging of the Old Testament story, this is the sort of collection where you discover a fresh bullet of truth with every reread – Jan Carson, Books of the Year * Irish Times *

Luke Kennard is a poet and writer of fiction who was born in Kingston Upon Thames in 1981. He won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2005 and his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers was published later that year. His second collection The Harbour Beyond the Movie was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted. His collection A Lost Expression was released in 2012 alongside an experimental short story, ‘Holophin’, which won the Saboteur Novella award that year. His collection Cain was published by Penned in the Margins in 2016 and shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His collection Notes on the Sonnets, an ‘anarchic’ response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2021. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. His first novel, The Transition, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and his second novel The Answer to Everything was published in 2021.

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