Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller

JHALAK PRIZE SHORTLIST  
 
In this moving and lyrical collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit – the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.
 
-----
 
Praise for Kei Miller:
 
"An expansive talent, of a writer stretching to catch up with his own curiosity and fertility.” - New Yorker
 
“Daring, unforgettable … He can shift from chatty to tragic to sublime in a line, and make it look easy.” - Telegraph
 
“Superb … wit and lyricism masterfully balanced to render a compelling whole.”  - Guardian
 
Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and has written several books across a range of genres. His 2014 poetry collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection; his 2017 novel, Augustown, won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature.