Kayo Chingonyi

Kayo Chingonyi (born 1987) is a Zambian British poet and editor who is the author of two poetry collections, Kumukanda and A Blood Condition. He has also published two earlier pamphlets, Some Bright Elegance (Salt Publishing, 2012) and The Colour of James Brown’s Scream (Akashic, 2016).

He is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode. Chingonyi has won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. Chinyongi was in the first generation of The Complete Works mentoring programme.

Writing Chingonyi's collection, Kumukanda (Vintage Publishing, 2017) won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Kumukanda was also shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize, the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Prize. His second collection, A Blood Condition, was published in 2021 by Vintage Publishing.

Chingonyi's work has been published in several anthologies, including The Best British Poetry, The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts, The Emma Press Anthology of Political Poems, Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poetry, and Ten: The New Wave. His essays, poems and reviews have been featured in online and print publications. He won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012. In 2015, he was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Chingonyi was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester. He then went on to be assistant professor of creative writing at Durham University.

Awards and honours

Literary awards Year Title Award Category Result Ref 2012 — Geoffrey Dearmer Prize — 2017 Kumukanda Costa Book Award Poetry Ted Hughes Award — 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize — Jhalak Prize — Roehampton Poetry Prize — Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize — Somerset Maugham Award —

Honours 2022: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Biblio