Booker-Longlist 2027: Luke Kennard for Black Bag

'The funniest and smartest novel I've read in a while' -- Zadie Smith

'A campus novel for our end times . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection' -- The Observer

This November bookseller-favourite Luke Kennard joins us to celebrate his booker-longlisted novel, Black Bag (on the eve of the ceremony, no less!).

Laugh-out-loud funny, wholly original, and an utter page turner, Black Bag offers the treatise on masculinity that many writers have attempted and fallen-short-of. If the evening is half-as-good as the book, it won't be one to miss!

A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation.

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, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as 'the cleverest and funniest thing I've read this year'.