Kae Tempest

Kae Tempest grew up in South-East London, where they still live.

Kae’s work includes Balance, their first album with her band Sound of Rum; Everything Speaks in its Own Way, a collection of poems on their own Zingaro imprint; GlassHouse, a play for Cardboard Citizens; and the Paines Plough commissioned plays Wasted (published by Methuen) and Hopelessly Devoted (published by Methuen). 

Their epic poem Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize 2013 (Kae being the only ever recipient under 40) and the Herald Angel at Edinburgh, and toured on both sides of the Atlantic to a live score. It is published by Picador. 

Kae’s first full collection of poetry, Hold Your Own was published by Picador in October 2014 and received wide critical acclaim.

In the same fortnight in October, Kae was awarded the Poetry Society's Next Generation Poet, a once a decade accolade and their debut solo album, Everybody Down (Big Dada Records, 2014), was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.

Their debut novel, The Bricks That Built The Houses (Bloomsbury, April 2016), was a Sunday Times Bestseller and has been published to critical acclaim in the UK, US, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Holland, Sweden and Denmark. It won the Books are My Bag Breakthrough Author Award.

Kae’s album Let Them Eat Chaos was released in 2016, alongside a volume of poetry of the lyrics (Picador), and was also nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and the Costa Prize for Poetry, respectively.

Their third album, The Book of Traps and Lessons, was released in 2019 and nominated for the Ivor Novello.

Their latest collection of poems, Running Upon the Wires, was published in 2018 to critical acclaim (Picador). Their new play Paradise, a retelling of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, is due to be staged at the National Theatre in 2021, having been postponed due to the pandemic. Its play text will be published by Picador.

In 2020, Faber published Kae’s first work of non-fiction, On Connection, which has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Catalan and Italian to date. They are currently working on a new record and new poetry collection.

“a wunderkind [with a] gift for shattering — and transcending — convention and conventional genres...While [their] intense performances on stage add a fierce urgency to the words, these text versions of the work stand powerfully on their own on the page...using [their] pictorial imagination to sear specific images into the reader’s mind." - Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times

[For amateur performing rights in Wasted and Hopelessly Devoted, permissions, or any general enquiries about Kae’s literary output including stage, film and TV, please contact Becky]