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Bloomsbury has snapped up Haunting the Black Air, a new collection by the T S Eliot Prize-winning author Anthony Joseph, whose work examines "the transnational vibrations of the African Diaspora".
Kayo Chingonyi acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to the collection, which will publish in Spring 2026, from Elise Dillsworth at the Elise Dillsworth Agency.
Chingonyi will also publish Joseph’s collected works, Precious and Impossible, on the Bloomsbury Poetry list this autumn. Introduced by Lauri Scheyer and collating three decades of Joseph’s work, Precious and Impossible will publish on 26th September.
Joseph’s most recent collection Sonnets for Albert was one of Chingonyi’s first acquisitions for Bloomsbury Poetry, and was awarded the 2023 T S Eliot Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry.
Joseph said: "I’m excited to be working with Kayo and the brilliant team at Bloomsbury on this new collection. They’re crafting an elegant poetry series here, and I’m honoured to be part of it. I always work towards book length projects. The new work is part of an evolving, eclectic collection of experiments which are finally finding their forms."
Chingonyi added: "It is thrilling to be able to present a document of the breadth of Anthony Joseph’s consummate poetic practice to date in Precious and Impossible and in Haunting the Black Air, to glimpse that boundless capacity for renewal which animates Joseph’s creativity. To read this work is to be in the presence of one who ventures to inhabit the full scope of the form."
Dillsworth commented: "Anthony is a truly innovative master of words and it is wonderful to celebrate the exhilarating breadth of his new and past poetry in these new collections, which have the perfect editor and publisher in Kayo and Bloomsbury."