We are delighted to welcome Luke Kennard to Waterstones Nottingham to celebrate the release of his new poetry collection, The Book of Jonah. Luke will be in conversation with Amy Acre.
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.
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.
Luke Kennard is a poet and novelist who lectures at the University of Birmingham. His third novel, Black Bag, will be published by Hachette in 2026. The Book of Jonah is his 7th full collection and follows Notes on the Sonnets which won the Forward Prize in 2021.
Amy Acre is a poet and editor, born in London and living in Nottingham. Her debut collection, Mothersong (Bloomsbury, 2023) was shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, highly commended in the Forward Prizes and named a Book of the Year in The Telegraph, The Financial Times and California Review of Books. She runs award-winning indie publisher, Bad Betty Press.
