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.

Anthony Joseph’s Haunting the Black Air is a polyphonic exploration of memory, diaspora and sound. Blending poetry, history and Caribbean cosmology, the collection moves with the rhythms of jazz, weaving personal narrative with shifting language. This work is attentive to breath, silence, resonance – and listens as much as it speaks