A Blood Condition

Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize for Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour 2022

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2021

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021

The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo Chingonyi

A Blood Condition tells a story of inheritance - the people, places, cultures and memories that form us. Kayo Chingonyi explores how distance and time, nations and a century's history, can collapse within a body; our past continuous in our present.

From London, Leeds, and The North East to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief and joy, the painful ongoing process of letting go, with remarkable music and clarity.