Zaffar Kunial is an English poet, essayist and academic. He has received a number of accolades for his work, including the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize.
Early life Kunial was born in Birmingham to an English mother and a Kashmiri father. He graduated from the London School of Economics. He later took evening classes with Michael Donaghy at City, University of London.
Career Kunial's entry "Hill Speak" came third in the 2011 National Poetry Competition. He won the 2013 Northern Writers' Award. In 2024, three of his poems won him the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. His debut pamphlet was part of the 2014 Faber New Poets series.
Kunial reunited with Faber & Faber for the publication of his debut poetry collection Us in 2018. Us was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Award for Poetry. This was followed by Kunial's pamphlet Six in 2019.
From 2019 to 2021, Kunial was a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow of the University of Leeds. Also in 2019, he was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Kunial's second collection England's Green was published in 2022. That year, Kunial won the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry. England's Green won a Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize, received the Laurel Prize for Poetry's second place, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and the Ondaatje Prize.
In 2023, Kunial served as Laureate of the Durham Book Festival.
Personal life Kunial lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire.
Bibliography Collections Us (2018) England's Green (2022)
Pamphlets Zaffar Kunial: Faber New Poets 11 (2014) Six (2019)
Select contributions The Shape Remembrance Takes, 5 poems in The Pity (2014) "Laburnum Time", essay in Arboreal (2016) in Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (2025), edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf
Accolades +YearAwardCategoryTitleResult 2011 National Poetry Competition "Hill Speak" 2013 Northern Writers' Award 2014 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize "The Word", "Q", "The Fielder" 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize Us Costa Book Awards Poetry 2022 Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes Poetry 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize England's Green Rathbones Folio Prize Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize Laurel Prize for Poetry Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize Second Collections
References
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/20/zaffar-kunial-made-in-moseley