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by Luke Kennard (Author)
'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' - Tristram Fane Saunders, TLS
A Telegragh, Irish Times, Guardian and The Week Book of the Year None of the Old Testament prophets were 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 poetry collection from the Forward Prize-winning author of Notes on the Sonnets. 'Brilliant . . . Deadly serious in the way only the playfully comic can be, the poems here are liable to leave you both smiling and wincing in the same breath' - Rishi Dastidar, Telegraph 'A fun, testing read - rather like being regaled at the pub by a tipsy Theology professor' - Telegraph, Books of the YearAuthor Biography
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. He has published several poetry collections, including The Harbour Beyond the Movie (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection); A Lost Expression; Cain (shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize); and Notes on the Sonnets (winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection); and The Book of Jonah. He is also the author of two novels: The Transition (longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize), and The Answer to Everything. He is also a professor at the University of Birmingham.
