Polkadot Wounds - Anthony Vahni Capildeo

Winner of the Scotland National Book Awards (Poetry Book of the Year) 2025Winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry 2025Winner of the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature 2025A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024Polkadot Wounds is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become 'landskips', playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity and movement across gaps. Dante's Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and far-flung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writer-in-residence with the Charles Causley Trust.