Interview by Chelsea Haith

In his second collection, A Blood Condition (2021), Kayo Chingonyi presents a voice wise and weary beyond his years. Nominated for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection alongside poets such as Selima Hill and Stephen Sexton, this new work testifies to the depth of Chingonyi’s engagement with history, embodiment, loss, and power. The collection is distinguished by its generic range, comprising prose poems and lyrics, and mingling introspections on grief with the vital aesthetic joy of his first love: rap.

In this interview, Chingonyi explores the formal and thematic concerns of his work, revealing his own personal negotiations with loss and life as he discusses his choices of form and content, and the demands of structure in his work.

The interview ends with a reading of ‘Chingola Road Cemetery’ from the new collection.

Writers Makes Worlds and Chelsea Haith thank Kayo Chingonyi for his time and generosity in granting this interview.

Cite this: “Kayo Chingonyi on Nation, Blood, and Poetic Form.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-kayo-chingonyi-a-blood-condition. Accessed 15 April 2026.

The post Kayo Chingonyi on Nation, Blood, and Poetic Form appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Kayo Chingonyi, 2008, Ant Smith (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Warsan Shire has described Chingonyi’s debut collection Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017) as a “brilliant debut – a tender, nostalgic and at times darkly hilarious exploration of black boyhood, masculinity and grief”. Much of Chingonyi’s work plays on these themes; weaving loss, masculinity, black identity and maturity into music, traditional poetic styles and spoken word. Chingonyi’s styles and modes of dissemination mirror a thematic concern that weaves through most of his publications, that of being ‘between worlds’. Referencing a cricket test match and rap music videos, Chingonyi highlights racial politics in high school sport and classrooms in ‘calling a spade a spade’ – writing:

Raised as I was, some words in this argot catch
in the throat, seemingly made for someone else
(the sticking point from which all else is fixed).

Here the in-between space is a catch in the throat, elsewhere, a border, or a heritage lost in diaspora.

His first pamphlet was received, in Natalie Teitler’s words, as a ‘beautifully structured, almost traditional work which fits well into the traditional British Canon. Closer reading, however, reveals a complex and sometimes subversive approach’. His more recent work is concerned with resistance – ‘the resistance to being defined’, as Kate Kellaway puts it. Placing his work both within and outside of the canon, these critics highlight the spaces that Chingonyi’s poetry brings into concert and the rising interest by British poets in navigating the borders between literary and performance genres. As an emcee and DJ his work reflects the influences of jazz, hip hop and RnB and his style infuses melancholic music with the clever rhythm and internal rhyme for which his poetry is known.

—Chelsea Haith, 2017

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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