Prodigal

An extraordinary memoir from the Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet

The extraordinary memoir from Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet, Kayo Chingonyi.

The extraordinary memoir from Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet, Kayo Chingonyi.

Did leaving begin the hold that writing would have over my life as a wrote into this most expansive of absences?

1993. Shortly after his father’s death, six-year-old Kayo leaves Zambia with his mother on a plan bound for a new life in Newcastle. Later, he learns that his father died from a HIV-related illness, a fate suffered by many Zambians, and some time afterwards, he becomes a young carer to his mother as the virus takes her too.

2016. Now a celebrated young poet, Kayo receives a message from a relative in Zambia he has not heard from in almost 25 years. He realises it is time to go back.

In Prodigal, Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi tells the story of that return and the winding journey that led him there. He reflects on the guilt and shame at the stigma of his parents' deaths, the uncertainty of a fraught coming-of-age, and reckoning with the challenge of writing his future when he didn't fully know his past. What emerges is a joyous tribute to the healing power of music, poetry and love, and a deeply moving account of how, in seeking to better understand those we love, we might also come to know ourselves and what it is to be human.