Black Bag

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His literary criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry London, and Times Literary Supplement. He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was named one of the 'Next Generation Poets' by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as 'the cleverest and funniest thing I've read this year'. Notes on the Sonnets, an anarchic response to Shakespeare's sonnets, won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. His first novel, The Transition, was BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His most recent novel is The Answer to Everything. His forthcoming poetry collection, The Book of Jonah, will be published by Picador in 2025.

Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair - through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other