Interview with Kei

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Nicholas Laughlin says:

“Perhaps the most thrilling literary event I’ve ever witnessed was a poetry reading at the 2008 Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica. The young American poet Aracelis Girmay, starting slow and quiet, ended with a delicate, rousing narrative poem, with the refrain “Love is for everybody.” Next the British poet Jackie Kay seduced the warmed-up audience–maybe five hundred people crammed into a huge tent–with her sly humour and cheeky timing. She finished to a roar of applause. Third on the bill was Kei Miller. I remember feeling awfully sorry for him, having to read after such a masterful performer as Kay. I watched Kei walk up to the stage, his head down, seeming anxious and determined. Then he looked up at the audience, began to speak, and gave what I can only imagine was the performance of a lifetime. His powerful voice was more like a preacher’s, or a prophet’s, and his words were electric, unsparing and soul-piercing music. I don’t actually remember what he read, but I remember that when he finished half the audience were on their feet screaming and the other half were in tears.

You get a sense of Kei’s charisma and the power of his voice in this podcast interview, which we recorded in July 2007, a few days after he gave a reading in Port of Spain. At that time he had two published books to his name, The Fear of Stones (short stories, shortlisted for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and Kingdom of Empty Bellies (poems). Since then he has published a second collection of poems, There Is an Anger That Moves; his first novel, The Same Earth; and the anthology New Caribbean Poetry. All before he turned thirty!”

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