Kae Tempest
Quick answer: A craft guide to Kae Tempest: myth laid over modern city lives, beat-driven rhythm and long-form sequences, with practice advice and where to start.
Kae Tempest is the closest thing modern British poetry has to a bard in the old sense: a performer who tells the whole city's story over a beat. Born in 1985 and raised in south-east London, Tempest won the Ted Hughes Award in 2013 for Brand New Ancients, a long poem for live voice and orchestra that casts ordinary Londoners as unwitting gods, and has twice been nominated for the Mercury Prize as a recording artist.
Tempest, who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, works across poetry collections, albums, plays and novels, but one method runs through everything: take the mythic frame seriously, then aim it at flats, night buses and shift workers. The result dignifies contemporary life without prettifying it.
Who they are
Tempest started rapping at sixteen in London's battle and open-mic scenes, and the hip-hop apprenticeship still powers the verse: breath control, internal rhyme, momentum. The books include Brand New Ancients, Hold Your Own, a collection threaded through the myth of Tiresias, and Divisible by Itself and One; the albums include Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos, both Mercury-nominated; the prose includes the novel The Bricks that Built the Houses and the essay On Connection.
They matter because they reopened the case for the long poem as popular art. Brand New Ancients and Let Them Eat Chaos are hour-long single works that hold theatre and festival audiences, a feat of structure as much as performance.
The signature moves
Across page and stage, four techniques do the load-bearing work.
What you can learn
Try the mythic overlay at small scale: choose one figure from any mythology and write them as someone in your neighbourhood today, keeping both layers visible in every stanza. The friction between god and bus stop is the poem.
Build a braided piece: three characters, one street, one hour, told in alternating sections that finally intersect. This teaches large-scale structure, the skill page poets most often lack and long-form performers must master. And test your pulse: read your draft while tapping a slow four-beat; lines that sprawl across the count need cutting or recasting. Structure carries half the weight in scored competition too, and a braided poem that converges cleanly is the kind of ambition judges remember.
Where to start
Read or, better, listen to Brand New Ancients first. Hold Your Own is the strongest single collection for the page. Among the albums, Let Them Eat Chaos, seven strangers awake at 4.18 a.m. on one street, is the masterwork of braided structure. On Connection distils their thinking about creativity and attention.
What poets can take from this
- Map a mythic figure onto a modern neighbour and keep both layers visible.
- Tap a four-beat pulse while reading drafts; recast lines that sprawl.
- Braid multiple characters toward one convergence to learn large structure.
- Break narrative once to address the audience directly, then return.
- Study rap verses for internal rhyme schemes you can import into poems.
Try it yourself
Pick a god or mythic figure and write them living on your street today: their job, their local shop, the moment their old power flickers through. Keep one mythic and one mundane detail in every stanza.
Questions
What is Kae Tempest famous for?
Tempest is known for long-form spoken works like Brand New Ancients, which won the Ted Hughes Award, and Mercury-nominated albums such as Let Them Eat Chaos, alongside poetry collections and a novel.
What pronouns does Kae Tempest use?
Kae Tempest is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, announcing their name and pronouns publicly in 2020.
Where should I start with Kae Tempest?
Listen to Brand New Ancients or the album Let Them Eat Chaos for the long-form work, and read Hold Your Own for the strongest page collection.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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