Book of Jonah by Luke Kennard

Book of Jonah

$17.99
$17.99
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Book of Jonah by Luke Kennard
  • Book of Jonah by Luke Kennard
Book of Jonah

Picador UK

Book of Jonah

by Luke Kennard

$17.99
$17.99
Out of stock

'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.
Book Details
Publisher:
Picador UK
ISBN:
9781035069262
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
96
Authors:
Luke Kennard
Published Date:
2025-12-09
Language:
English
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All Poetry English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh European Religious

About Luke Kennard

Winner of the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection for Notes on the Sonnets (Penned in the Margins, 2021), a collection of prose poems, Luke Kennard is a British poet, critic, and novelist who teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2005, the year his debut, The Solex Brothers, appeared. His second collection, The Harbour Beyond the Movie (2007), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him at the time the youngest poet nominated. Further collections include The Migraine Hotel (2009), A Lost Expression (2012), and Cain (2016). In 2014 the Poetry Book Society named him among its Next Generation Poets. He lives in Birmingham.

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