A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane
Luke Kennard
Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist
His literary criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry London, and Times Literary Supplement. He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.
In 2014, he was named one of the ‘Next Generation Poets’ by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. Cain, his collection of poetry, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as ‘the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year’. Notes on the Sonnets, an anarchic response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021.
Black Bag was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Luke Kennard on Black Bag
‘I came across the original 1960s black bag experiment by accident when I was researching something else. It caught my attention, but I was more interested in the person playing black bag than the results of the study. My narrator is a struggling actor, but I think it’s about trying to be an artist of any kind in the current moment, when arts and culture are so systematically undervalued, when the doubts seem to loom larger than the possibilities. It really tests your hubristic self-belief, and leaves you with a kind of all-pervading shame, which is always a good subject matter for fiction.’
Read the full interview here.
All nominated books
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane
Features
- Book recommendations
The Booker Prize 2026 shortlist: what our judges said
- Reading guides
Reading guide: Black Bag by Luke Kennard
- Book extract
An extract from Black Bag by Luke Kennard
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