Thu 19th March
6.30-9pm
Join us to celebrate the publication of Black Bag by Luke Kennard.
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, like can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate devises a vision for monetising this intriguing new situation …
Inspired by a real-life psychology experiment from the 1960s, this is a warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a book: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His literary criticism has appeared in the LRB, Poetry London, and TLS. He is a Professor of 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'. Notes on the Sonnets, an anarchic response to Shakespeare's sonnets, won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021.
His first novel, The Transition, was BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His most recent novel is The Answer to Everything and his latest poetry collection, The Book of Jonah, was published by Picador in 2025.