The Book of Jonah

’Kennard’s distinctive voice - surreal, funny, anxious, always overthinking, and cringingly self-deprecating - has made him one of the most widely liked and imitated British poets under forty’ Tristram Fane Saunders, TLS

None of the Old Testament prophets was especially happy or confident in their calling, but Jonah was the only one who rejected it outright, disobeying direct instruction from God and literally running away. In The Book of Jonah, Luke Kennard transforms the unique and awkward position Jonah’s story occupies in scripture - part dream, part joke, part provocation - into a madcap picaresque which marries the sacred and the absurd.

Though Jonah’s encounter with the whale is most commonly interpreted as the story of a reluctant prophet being punished by his maker, Kennard’s Jonah is more wily business traveller than seer. Taking his instruction instead from non-governmental organizations, arts development agencies and public-relations gurus, this Jonah keeps relentlessly busy, accepting any assignment that will take him further away from Nineveh and drown out the word of God in his ears. On his travels he meets errant writers, fixers, artists and consultants, but nobody who can give him a sense of what his work might be beyond a five-star capitalist purgatory in a series of exotic locations. What would it mean to be a prophet - or even a false prophet - in this milieu?

Taking on the decimation of funding for the arts, the emptiness of the hero’s journey and a literary culture regarded by wider society with cynicism, ignorance and apathy, The Book of Jonah is a blistering new collection from the Forward Prize-winning author of Notes on the Sonnets.

Luke Kennard is a poet and writer of fiction who was born in Kingston Upon Thames in 1981. He won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2005 and his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers was published later that year. His second collection The Harbour Beyond the Movie was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted. His collection A Lost Expression was released in 2012 alongside an experimental short story, ’Holophin’, which won the Saboteur Novella award that year. His collection Cain was published by Penned in the Margins in 2016 and shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His collection Notes on the Sonnets, an ’anarchic’ response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2021.

In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. His first novel, The Transition, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and his second novel The Answer to Everything was published in 2021.