Beneath the surface we are all connected . . . 'An authentically soothing, powerful, thought-provoker.' MATT HAIG 'On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.' MAX PORTER 'On Connection came to me when I needed it most, and reminded me that the links we have to places, people, words, ourselves, are what keep us alive.' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS Drawing on twenty years' experience as a writer and performer, award-winning poet, rapper and storyteller Kae Tempest explores how and why creativity - however we choose to practise it - can cultivate greater self-awareness and help us establish a deeper relationship to ourselves and the world. Personal, hopeful and written with piercing clarity,On Connection is a meditation on creative connection and call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth. 'Persuasive and profound.'OBSERVER 'Tempest's prose is crisp and thoughtful.'NEW STATESMAN

On Connection (Faber Social)

Arts & Photography

Tempest, Kae

Music

Faber & Faber Social

Staggering talent Kae Tempest's first work of non-fiction: a meditation on the power of creative connection.

On Connection

Religion & Spirituality

Faber&Faber

Three old friends in their mid-twenties. One remarkable day. For Ted, Danny and Charlotte, it's time to seize control. Make a difference. Change things. This is it.
A day trip through the parks and raves and cafes of South London, where life is what you make it. The rapid-fire words of Kate Tempest paint a picture of lives less ordinary in an unforgiving world, soundtracked by an exhilarating score.
A play about love, life and losing your mind, Wasted heralded the dramatic career of one of the UK's most exciting performance poets, Kate Tempest. It was originally produced by Paines Plough and is published here as a Methuen Drama Student Edition alongside commentary and notes by Katie Beswick, lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter.
The ancillary material is geared at students and includes:
- an introduction outlining the play's plot, character, themes context and performance history - the full text of the play - a chronology of the playwright's life and work - extensive textual notes

Wasted (Student Editions)

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Methuen Drama

I'm making a decision. I'm changing things. This is it. Three old friends in their mid-twenties. One remarkable day. For Ted, Danny and Charlotte, it's time to seize control. Make a difference. Change things. This is it.
A day trip through the parks and raves and cafes of South London, where life is what you make it. The rapid fire words of Kate Tempest paint a picture of lives less ordinary in an unforgiving world, sound-tracked by an exhilarating score.
The drama mixes rap-style poetry delivered with microphones and self-reflexive addresses to the audience.
A play about love, life and losing your mind, and the first play from one of the UK's most exciting performance poets, Kate Tempest.

Wasted (Modern Plays)

Freedom has only ever meant Love. And life lived without love Is not life enough.
 Chess is in prison. Facing a lengthy sentence, her cell mate, Serena, becomes her soul mate. But when Serena is given parole, Chess faces total isolation.
 Hope comes in the form of a music producer looking for a reason to love music again. She finds a powerful voice in Chess. But to harness her talent, Chess must first face her past.
 Featuring Kate Tempest's trademark lyrical fireworks and live music, this is a story of love and redemption.
 Hopelessly Devoted received its world premiere on 19 September 2013 at the DOOR, Birmingham Rep, co-produced by Paines Plough and Birmingham Rep. It toured the UK again in 2014.

Hopelessly Devoted (Modern Plays)

Running Upon The Wires

Picador

‘Tempest has a gift for shattering and transcending convention.’ New York Times\nPhiloctetes lives in a cave on a desolate island: the wartime hero is now a wounded outcast. Stranded for ten years, he sees a chance of escape when a young soldier appears with tales of Philoctetes’ past glories. But with hope comes suspicion – and, as an old enemy emerges, he is faced with an even greater temptation: revenge.\nKae Tempest is now widely acknowledged as a revolutionary force in contemporary British poetry, music and drama; they continue to expand the range of their work with a new version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes in a bold new translation. Like Brand New Ancients before it, Paradise shows Tempest’s gift for lending the old tales an immediate contemporary relevance – and will find this timeless story a wide new audience.

Paradise

Becky, Harry, and Leon are leaving London in a fourth-hand Ford with a suitcase full of stolen money, in a mess of tangled loyalties and impulses. But can they truly leave the city that's in their bones?
Kate Tempest's novel reaches back through time--through tensely quiet dining rooms and crassly loud clubs--to the first time Becky and Harry meet. It sprawls through their lives and those they touch--of their families and friends and faces on the street--revealing intimacies and the moments that make them. And it captures the contemporary struggle of urban life, of young people seeking jobs or juggling jobs, harboring ambitions and making compromises.
The Bricks that Built the Houses is an unexpected love story. It's about being young, but being part of something old. It's about how we become ourselves, and how we effect our futures. Rich in character and restless in perspective, driven by ethics and empathy, it asks--and seeks to answer--how best to live with and love one another.
Kate Tempest, a major talent in the poetry and music worlds, sits poised to become a major novelist as well.

The Bricks that Built the Houses

Literary

Bloomsbury USA

My heart throws its head against my ribs, / it's denting every bone it's venting something it has known since I arrived and felt it beat.
Kate Tempest, winner of the Ted Hughes Award for Brand New Ancients and widely regarded as the UK's leading spoken word poet, has produced a new poem-sequence of electrifying power. Based on the myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, Hold Your Own is a riveting tale of youth and experience, sex and love, wealth and poverty, community and alienation. Walking in the forest one morning, a young man disturbs two copulating snakes--and is punished by the goddess Hera, who turns him into a woman. This is only the beginning of his journey . . . Weaving elements of classical myth, autobiography and social commentary, Tempest uses the story of the gender-switching, clairvoyant Tiresias to create four sequences of poems, addressing childhood, manhood, womanhood, and late life. The result is a rhythmically hypnotic tour de force--and a hugely ambitious leap forward for one of the most broadly talented and compelling young writers today.

Hold Your Own: Poems

Poetry

Yes, the gods are on the park bench, the gods are on the bus, / The gods are all here, the gods are in us. / The gods are timeless, fearless, fighting to be bold, / conviction is a heavy hand to hold, / grip it, winged sandals tearing up the pavement -- / you, me, everyone: Brand New Ancients.
Kate Tempest's words in Brand New Ancients are written to be read aloud; the book combines poem, rap, and humanist sermon, by turns tender and fierce. Set in Southeast London, Brand New Ancients finds the mythic in the mundane. It is the story of two half-brothers, Thomas and Clive, unknown to each other -- Thomas the result of an affair between his mother and Clive's father. Tempest, with wide-ranging empathy, takes us inside the passionless marriage of Jane and Kevin -- the man who suspects Thomas is not his son, but loves him just the same -- and the neighboring home of Mary and Brian, where betrayal has not been so placidly accepted. The sons of these two households -- quiet, creative Thomas and angry, destructive Clive -- will cross paths in adolescence, their fates converging with mortal fury.
These characters' loves, their infidelities, their disappointments and their small comforts -- these, Tempest argues, are timeless. Our lives and our choices are no less important than those of history and myth. Awarded the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, Brand New Ancients insists on our importance as individuals -- and asserts Kate Tempest's importance as a talent impossible to ignore.

Brand New Ancients: A Poem

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Books by Tempest, Kae