Haunting the Black Air

Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Poetry. He is the author of four poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. As a musician, he has released nine critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.

Joseph is rightly celebrated for being able to do two seemingly contradictory things at once: to write with an incantatory sense of performance, and to engage with avant-garde cultural theory. These are poems that fit in a packed auditorium as much as they do in a 10,000-word scholarly article on formal innovation, which is something of a singular achievement . . . Approach Haunting the Black Air without intimidation, tune in to its frequency, and let it carry you through its dancing and lamenting, right through to its wistful and consoling final lines