Things I Have Withheld (Hardback) Kei Miller (author)

Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize for Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour 2022

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2021

In this astonishing 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.

Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women’s tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.

With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why – our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions – and those of the world around us.

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781838852795
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 343 g
Dimensions: 220 x 144 x 24 mm
Edition: Main