The Interview : Luke Kennard

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Luke Kennard, an academic, a poet and a novelist, who 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, his collection of poetry, 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 literary criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry London, and Times Literary Supplement. His novel, Black Bag, has been  longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026

Congratulations on the Booker prize longlisting of Black Bag Luke. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl

RS:  Black Bag begins with one of the most striking premises in recent fiction: a struggling actor employed to sit inside a black bag during university lectures. At what point did this idea first occur to you, and what made you believe it contained the possibility of a full-length novel?

LK: Thank you so much! I came across the idea by accident. In 2020 I was reading a couple of social psychology papers about Attraction Theory (I was looking for a theory or a term that might make a good title for another project) and I stumbled on a brief account of the ‘Black Bag’ experiment in a footnote. It immediately struck me as strange and charming – a really unusual scenario which really only could have happened in the 1960s. But what interested me, rather than the outcome of the experiment itself (which focused on the other students’ reactions to black bag), was what kind of person would accept the role of black bag, and what would it feel like to them? I supposed that it would be an out-of-work actor, and immediately started working on that voice. The first scene I wrote was him already in a lecture theatre, wearing the bag. It was a while before I realised that the novel needed to start before the beginning of the experiment.

RS: The protagonist in Black Bag is an actor whose professional and personal life are defined by performance, yet his most significant role involves disappearing from view inside a bag. What drew you to this paradox, and what contemporary ideas of selfhood, and authenticity does it allude to?

LK: There’s an irony in that he really stands out – everyone is going to notice him, pass comment on him or try to interact with him – but as an individual he’s sort of erased. I suppose that has some resonance with being in the world as any individual and all the assumptions and attributions people will make about us, whoever we are. A completely doomed attempt to be some kind of pure existence without qualities! Is that still “being”? I’m not sure. I think it’s also about trying to be an artist of any kind in the 21st century. The amount of hubris and self-belief you need to put any sort of work out there when it feels quite systematically undervalued and you’re mostly going to feel utterly ridiculous; you’re going to feel, ‘Who am I do think anyone should pay attention to my work?’ I think we’re in an age where we’ve forgotten something central and collective about art. There’s a hilarious and tragic irony to people using AI to generate fiction, to the point where more writing is produced every year than a human being could read in a hundred lifetimes. People seem to want this ‘status’ conveyed by being a writer at the exact historical point where it doesn’t exist anymore, and that makes me laugh until I hyperventilate. And then feel a bit sad.

RS: As a poet, you are celebrated for your wit, formal inventiveness, and precision of language. How did your background in poetry shape the voice, structure, and rhythms of Black Bag? Did writing a novel require you to rethink any of your creative habits? And if I may ask, what role does comedy play in your creative process?

LK: I always feel like comedy needs to be defended. In real life we mostly interact with each other through different levels of humour and play, even when we’re being serious, and I think literature needs to reflect the social in that way. People often say that humour is very subjective, but I actually disagree with that completely. If I tell a joke and nobody laughs I don’t think, ‘Well, humour is subjective.’; I think I’ve told a bad joke! Comedy relies on incongruity, a certain upending of expectation; and for there to be incongruity there has to be a congruence for it to deviate from. Comedy is actually the most collective, consensus-driven form. It’s the least subjective.

This is my third novel, but it’s the first one that I really enjoyed writing, and I think that’s because I leaned more into the voice, and the strange poetic elements (tangents, allusions, the dramatic monologue) which I feel most comfortable with.

Poetry and poetic techniques are important in fiction, not necessarily on the level of imagery or lyricism (I actually find novels written by people who don’t write poetry tend to be more lyrical and imagistic in their approach) but because poetry requires you to try to observe intensely and tell a kind of skewed truth about the world as you see it.

RS: Critics have compared the novel's conceptual framework to experimental fiction while also praising its warmth and accessibility. Were there particular writers, artists, or traditions that influenced Black Bag, either in terms of its structure or its blend of intellectual inquiry and comedy?

LK: That’s a really kind and generous take on it, and I’m glad it comes off that way! I think as writers we’re always trying to balance our obsessions and our desire to do something innovative or challenging with trying to make art that people can enjoy. We’re trying to write something that we ourselves would enjoy reading, sure, and we have to hold ourselves to the highest standards we’re capable of. But there’s always that balance between pushing against tropes, pushing against the boring or overdone, but trying not to disappear completely into the conceptual. I love a lot of American literature of the last fifty years for its experimental approach that remains completely humane and genuinely funny. Writers like Donald Antrim, Lydia Davis, Gilbert Sorrentino. Too many to list, really. Ultimately we usually find ourselves writing about love, one way or another, and trying to make some sense of that – because it’s confusing and inexhaustible.

RS: Your novel satirises a wide range of contemporary phenomena—from academia and post-humanist theory to cryptocurrency culture and the precarious gig economy. Yet you have managed to balance satire with empathy, ensuring that your characters remain recognisably human rather than merely vehicles for social critique. Did you face any challenges in walking this tight rope?

LK: That’s a perfect way of putting it – the tight rope. I think it applies to almost every genre or style – we’re always trying to walk that tight rope. If you’re writing romantic fiction, you want it to be convincing and exciting and sexy, but you want to avoid it being sentimental or excessive. If you’re writing satire you want it to hit its targets and to channel that anger, but that’s not going to work if there’s no heart, if there’s no sentiment and the characters feel like cardboard. It’s too easy to mock something you’ve decided is worthless, just as it’s too easy to write ‘He felt like she would love her forever and a day’, and expect the reader to feel that too. Probably the question we always need to ask ourselves is ‘What if I’m completely wrong about this?’ and write accordingly; write as if from the opposite attitude so that we’re really testing our techniques.

RS:  Before gaining recognition as a novelist, you established yourself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British poetry. What, if anything, does poetry allow you to discover that fiction does not—and conversely, what freedoms did the novel form offer while writing Black Bag?

LK: I’m usually enjoying myself when I’m writing poetry because it feels like a kind of musical improvisation on an instrument I made myself – a trombone with strings on it or something. Fiction requires me to work a bit harder and suffer more because I really want to keep the story and the cause-and-effect working logically, and too often that can dampen the energy of the writing. Poetry is pure energy for me – channelling a voice, a run of images, a weird thought process, for as long as you can stay with it. So the things I discover are stranger, and sometimes revelatory, but there’s also a risk of it becoming so idiosyncratic that I’m not taking anyone with me. Now, some writers thrive in that space and that attitude, and I admire it, but I’m ultimately quite insecure and feel the need to be understood.

RS: Having written acclaimed poetry, criticism, and now a Booker-longlisted novel, how do you view the relationship between form and subject? Looking back at Black Bag, do you feel there were ideas about art, performance, or contemporary life that could only have been explored through the expansiveness of the novel?

LK: It is expansive, isn’t it? It allows you to really unfold some ideas in a variety of directions and through a range of characters. Poetry probably requires some more focus, but it still has that ambiguity and ambivalence. I think the main difference is that people still read novels; there’s still a substantial audience, which often feels a bit lacking in poetry. Poetry can feel increasingly lonely once you’ve been doing it for 25 years, and you start to feel ‘Why am I even bothering? What do my ideas about art and performance count for if basically nobody is encountering them?’ I think Black Bag is a kind of extended poetic monologue posing as a novel. There’s a vast, intelligent readership who enjoy being challenged as well as entertained, and they’d probably really love poetry if they gave it a chance, but the fact is they mostly don’t want to.

RS: Throughout your career—from Cain and Notes on the Sonnets to Black Bag—you have shown a fascination with literary forms and expectations, often subverting them in unexpected ways. What excites you most about disrupting conventions, and what new possibilities do you think such experimentation opens up for contemporary literature?

LK: It’s that sense of not quite behaving yourself, which characterises a lot of great writing for me; a refusal of the exact conventions available and that desire to make something new, awkward and celebratory of that awkwardness.

RS: Universities, research culture, and academic language play a significant role in the novel. As someone who teaches Creative Writing within a university setting, how has your experience of academia informed your fiction?

LK: I feel lucky to have this job. Universities are sort of mad places, and there’s a central irony which makes a good backdrop for fictional worlds: this is an intellectual haven, a sanctuary for people who are so passionate about (and hopefully brilliant in) their fields their almost incapable of doing anything else. But it’s also become a business, increasingly corporatised and borrowing ridiculous corporate terms: strategy, KPIs, vision, blah blah blah. But there’s also the fact that, in the seminar room, people get treated with dignity, their work and their ideas are taken seriously. I think that’s quite rare, in everyday life, and it’s precious. Being a lecturer is busy, and sometimes fairly menial – you have to mark and assess approximately a million words of assignments a year, for instance – but the privilege of working with other people on their projects, in trying to help them realise their potential, being part of that process that gives them permission in their own work, and permission to take themselves seriously… That’s a real joy, and it’s grounding for me.

Thank you Luke, for talking to The Wise Owl about your book Black Bag and your creative process. We wish you the very best in all your creative endeavours.