Luke Kennard

This afternoon session welcomes award-winning poet and novelist Luke Kennard, whose recent publications include ‘The Book of Jonah’ (Picador, 2025), ‘Black Bag’ (Hachette, 2026), longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize, and ‘Notes on the Sonnets’ (2021), which won the 2021 Forward Prize. Kennard joins us to talk about how religious belief and narrative continues to shape and inform much of his creative work. In ‘The Book of Jonah’, Kennard brings wit and irreverence to one of the Bible’s strangest stories – while both Jonahs run away, Kennard’s is a wily and evasive business traveller, fleeing God through NGOs, arts agencies, and PR consultants, accepting any assignment that will take him further away from Nineveh. Blending the sacred with the absurd, Kennard asks what prophecy, purpose, and even false prophecy might mean within the restless machinery of global capitalism today.

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist, the author of seven collections of poetry and three novels. His sixth collection, ‘Notes on the Sonnets’ won the Forward Prize in 2021. His latest novel, ‘Black Bag’, published by Hachette in 2026, is longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026. He lives in the West Midlands and is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Birmingham.