Zaffar Kunial – författare

From the beginning, the poet was a wanderer, a storyteller, an imaginer of bridges between worlds. Zaffar Kunial is just such a poet and guide for us today. Yet his territory extends much further afield than those of the past - through Kashmir, where his father was born and now lives, to the Midlands of his mother's birth, and further north to ancestors in Orkney, as well as through language, memory and time. Already an acknowledged star of the Faber New Poets scheme, Kunial has won admirers in such measure as to ensure that Us is one of the most anticipated debuts in recent times. Across its pages, he vocalises what it means to be a human being planting your two feet upon the dizzying earth - and he does so delicately, urgently, intimately - in some of the most original and touching ways that you will read.

Us is the eloquent and affecting debut from the talented Zaffar Kunial. In a series of approachable, lyric narratives, the poems in Kunial's hypnotic collection look with a tender toughness at his upbringing by his English mother and Lahore-based, Kashmiri father, and the distances his own life has had to travel in between. With pinpoint precision, Kunial unlocks his familial and national languages to examine worlds to which he at once belongs and remains simultaneously estranged. Already an acknowledged star of the Faber New Poets scheme, Kunial has won admirers and awards in such measure as to ensure that Us will be one of the most talked about debuts in recent times.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZEPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONZaffar Kunial is a proven master of taking things apart, polishing the fugitive parts of single words, of a sound, a colour, the name of a flower, and putting them back together so that we see them in an entirely different light. In the poems of England's Green, we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know, and we are made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the 'dark missing / step in a stair', entering this new world with bated breath. By such close attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken. Fully formed, they share a centre of gravity: migrations, memories, little transgressions and disturbances, summoned and contained in small gestures - a hand held, the smell of a newly bred rose or the scratch a limpet makes to mark its home.'Zaffar Kunial is a poet whose work thrills me, who makes you return to the origins of things, places, language and people again and again. He's a poet who takes traditions seriously but makes of them something entirely new - a must.' Jackie Kay

Zaffar Kunial is a proven master of taking things apart, polishing up the fugitive parts of single words, of a sound, a colour, the name of a flower, and putting them back together so that we see them in an entirely different light. In the poems of England's Greenwe are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know and made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the 'dark missing/step in a stair', entering this new world with bated breath. By such close attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken. Fully formed, they share a centre of gravity: migrations, memories, little transgressions and disturbances, summoned and contained in small gestures - a hand held, the smell of a newly bred rose or the scratch a limpet makes to mark its home.'Zaffar Kunial is a poet whose work thrills me, who makes you return to the origins of things, places, language and people again and again. He's a poet who takes traditions seriously but makes of them something entirely new - a must.' Jackie Kay