Luke Kennard

I think the best hangover song of all time is REM’s ‘How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us’. That’s like my hangover anthem. Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ a close second.

Black Bag by Luke Kennard This delightful and dark picaresque from Kennard (The Transition) follows a mid-career English actor struggling to make ends mee...

Stateside pre-release write-up of my next novel from Publishers Weekly!
www.publishersweekly.com/9781638933380

That does sound genuinely beautiful!

I’m still hungry but at least I’ve lost my appetite.

Just had a “pulled turkey” sandwich because I was like, oh wow you can *pull* turkey? And no, having eaten it, no you absolutely can’t, and they should have stopped pulling it the moment that became clear.

I would argue it’s at least as much of a place as Basingstoke

Once again EXCLUDED from the Ondaatje Prize because apparently THE LIFE OF THE MIND does not count as a PLACE

-As poet laureate of Birmingham this is your seventh poem about Uniqlo and people are starting to ask questions.
-We’ve needed a Uniqlo for *so* long. If people don’t like it they can take it up with Uniqlo.

🎵 well it’s Christmas time for me and mine / gonna waterboard you with mulled wine

I think it’s partly the forced jollity of a group of men who’d beat you with a pool cue until you got detached retinas for $100

I’m workshopping why, in a strong field, I despise the rat pack Christmas songs most of all

Yeah! I’m just 80 pages in (and having to go back to the cast of characters a lot to keep up), but it’s magnificent!

Exactly. Fuck these people. I’m reading Hilary Mantel’s Robespierre novel at the moment and it’s feeling eerily prescient.

I mean if we all chipped in we could probably save higher education, health care free at the point of use, maybe some youth clubs if only there was some way of

It’s one banana, Michael, what could it possibly cost? £11bn?

It would be really churlish to be fucking furious about this. They probably tried *really* hard not to piss ELEVEN BILLION POUNDS of our money up the wall.

Let’s be magnanimous like when someone seriously ill doesn’t get their dla taken away

Worse things happen at sea, like when you drop £12bn in the sea

Ah well, it’s only £11bn of our money that we earned in our jobs that we have to do all the time, and then gave to the government - let’s just write it off the way you do when one of us doesn’t pay a bill or something

This is not something that should ever happen at the start of a working day. Just sponsor a goat or something.

I appreciate the ecological gesture, but the design of a liquid soap bottle is *very* precisely calibrated to its viscosity, and if you water down the last bit it will JET OUT at an acute angle into the user’s face and top

Also completely unhelpful.
-When shall we meet?
-Oh, whenever - any time!
-Right. So when then?
-[steely] I am available at *any* time.

Well that’s just not going to be true for *anyone*, is it, Outlook?

There’s a pretty massive disconnect between the amount of money we’re assumed to have and the amount of money 97% of us do in fact have. Or feature writers are directly funded by credit card companies or something.

My 2025 of the year

I guess the first thing you should know about my just-published book is that this is a bunch of things that were bothering me 3-5 years ago and I can’t really even remember what most of them were now.

So I guess what I’m saying is, *thank you* mark zuckerberk, *thank you* elon musk. 6D chess. You accidentally saved the children. Shame on all of us that it took such wieners to break the spell.

This hasn’t been the case for about 15 years. It’s made so many young people’s lives so, so much worse in so many ways. But my 11yo doesn’t want a phone at all - he’s like why the hell would I want something like that?

My kids’ generation are in this enviable position where there’s no pressure whatsoever to be on social media because it’s *so shit*

we not trolls! we not trolls! I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and turn into a btl comment from 2009