Kei Miller – författare

From the WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2014, a 'humorous, bittersweet fiction, combin[ing] the fantastical realism of Marquez with the domestic comedy of Andrea Levy' INDEPENDENTIt all begins with the theft of Tessa Walcott's panties...After the hurricane of 1974, Jamaica is devastated. Imelda Richardson is sent to England, without a place to stay or a plan of what to do. Luckily sheis taken in by Purletta Johnson, a member of the ex-pat bourgeoisie who has decided to become more Jamaican than any Jamaican: sucking her teeth, sporting a gold tooth, and growing ganja on her balcony. But when her mother dies Imelda returns to Jamaica. When Tessa Walcott's panties are stolen, she and Imelda set up a Neighbourhood Watch. But they haven't counted on Pastor Braithwaite who denounces them in Church. The church-goers turn on Imelda, and when the river suddenly floods her home it is seen as a punishment from God. A Pentecostal fervour sweeps through the village of Watersgate, fuelled by Evangelist Millie. In her last great crusade, Miss Millie organises 'fire to burn their sins away', equipping the villagers with kerosene as they set about burning everything. Now they are marching on the gay man's house and only Imelda can save him.

'One woman's tragic tale, beautifully told' Independent on Sunday FROM KEI MILLER, WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTIONOnce upon a time in Jamaica a young woman went somewhere that no one had visited for years. It may have been nestled in a valley between the Stone Hill mountains of St Catherine, four rocking chairs on a veranda surveying a garden full of bougainvillea and vegetables. Or perhaps it was merely a pastel-coloured house on an ordinary street in Spanish Town.One thing everyone agrees on: this is the place that Adamine Bustamante was born.When Adamine grows up she discovers she has the gift of 'warning': the power to both protect and terrify. But no one tells her that in England her prophecies of hurricanes and earthquakes will meet with a different kind of fear. Now Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with 'Mr Writer Man', for he is taking her words and twisting them...A ROLLERCOASTER OF A NOVEL ABOUT A YOUNG JAMAICAN WOMAN WITH A GIFT OF PROPHECY EMBARKING ON AN EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEYPraise for Kei Miller, winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Green Carnation Prize and the Historical Writers Award:'Miller's storytelling is superb' Sunday Times'Language as clear as spring water' Observer'Richly nuanced and empathetic' Guardian'Truly panoramic' Sunday Telegraph

WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR CARIBBEAN LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE, THE GREEN CARNATION PRIZE, and the HISTORICAL WRITERS AWARD'Miller's storytelling is superb' SUNDAY TIMESOne April day in Augustown, Jamaica. Ma Taffy, old and blind, sits in her usual spot on the veranda. No matter how the world tilts around her, come hurricane or riot, she knows everything that goes on in this small community. Which is why, when her six-year-old nephew returns home from school with his dreadlocks shorn, she realises that trouble won't be far behind. And so she tells him the story of Alexander Bedward, the flying preacherman. She remembers what happened to the Rastaman and his helper, Bongo Moody; she thinks of Soft-Paw, the leader of the Angola gang, and what lies beneath her house. For trouble is brewing once more among the ramshackle lanes of Augustown, and as Ma Taffy knows, each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, each day contains all of history...

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020Longlisted for the 2020 Polari PrizeA Telegraph Book of the Year 2019The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet – the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.

WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITINGIn this astonishing collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.

Kei Miller's work was acclaimed by the distinguished Jamaican writer Olive Senior as 'Some of the most exciting poetry I’ve read in years... An extraordinary new voice singing with clarity and grace.' A Light Song of Light sings in the rhythms of ritual and folktale, praise songs and anecdotes, blending lyricism with a cool wit, finding the languages in which poetry can sing in dark times.The book is in two parts: Day Time and Night Time, each exploring the inseparable elements that together make a whole. Behind the daylight world of community lies another, disordered, landscape: stories of ghosts and bandits, a darkness violent and seductive. At the heart of the collection is the Singerman, a member of Jamaica's road gangs in the 1930s, whose job was to sing while the rest of the gang broke stones. He is a presence both mundane and shamanic. Kei Miller’s poems celebrate 'our incredible and abundant lives', facing the darkness and making from it a song of the light.Cover photograph: Detail of balmyard constructed from zinc, Jamaica. Copyright © Kei Miller.

In his new collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it (‘I never get involved / with the muddy affairs of land’), is gradually compelled to recognise – even to envy – a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that ‘constrict like throats’, every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

The Caribbean is producing some of the most innovative and sophisticated poets in world literature today. This anthology turns the spotlight on eight New Caribbean poets. Between them, they represent the range of Caribbean identities and experiences: they are black, white, Indian and in between. Their first language is French, Spanish and English. They are home-bodies. They are world travellers. They represent all kinds of diaspora — from the islander who sought and made home in a foreign land, to the foreigner who sought and made home in the islands. The common thread between them is that they are all very good, and all are committed to the magical possibilities of language.

The six sequences of There Is an Anger that Moves travel from Jamaica to England and back. A mother's heart is broken; men fall in love secretly; people dance until they die. Religion haunts these disbelieving poems which move sometimes to the measure of a hymn, sometimes to the cadence of a Baptist sermon. Each swells with its own conviction, even when that conviction is doubt. Miller makes us believe in the power of unexpected things: the colour orange, broken coffins, ice cream and in the transforming power of poetry.From this book Kei Miller emerges as one of the most compelling and subtle new voices from the Caribbean.