T. S. Eliot Prize Winner 2020 How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil

Huge congratulations go to Bhanu Kapil who has won the 2020 T. S. Eliot poetry prize.

The collection contains a series of poems in which the narrator, separated from family members and home,  addresses her host who has taken the narrator into her home. The collection partly explores the relationship between host and guest. Quickly we realise as we read that we're not just reading about a personal relationship between landlord and tenant but about the relationship between a country of origin and host country. In Kapil's case, India and the United Kingdom. At times, Kapil portrays the host country as a mother figure, and at other times as a predator. She's generous and selfish. The guest/tenant is presented as grateful but also trapped and a victim. She tries to escape and become her own person.

Other poems inhabit the collection. They are poems about home and family. They are poems of loss and longing.

Bhanu Kapil

Here's a reading from How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil

Here's a video from YouTube showing a reading and introduction to Kapil's poetry from Churchill College Cambridge. I think it must have been recorded during the first lockdown between March and July 2020.