hip-hop

Kae Tempest

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London poet, playwright and novelist who raps as an extension of the page — dense narrative verse delivered with the cadence of spoken word rather than bars.

Tempest was born in 1985 in southeast London and grew up in Brockley, one of five children of a labourer studying to become a criminal lawyer and a teacher. He worked in a record shop from fourteen to eighteen, left Thomas Tallis School at sixteen for the BRIT School for Performing Arts in Croydon, and first performed at open-mic nights in a small hip-hop record shop in Soho before studying English Literature at Goldsmiths.

Performing early on as "Excentral Tempest", he formed the band Sound of Rum in 2008 with guitarist Archie Marsh and drummer Ferry Lawrenson, releasing the single "Slow Slow" and the album Balance in 2011 on the Sunday Best label.

In 2012 Tempest staged the orchestral spoken-word piece Brand New Ancients, which won the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry the following year along with a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe. The albums Everybody Down (2014) and Let Them Eat Chaos (2016) were both shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and the accompanying poetry collection was nominated for the Costa Book of the Year.

His debut novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses (2016), became a Sunday Times bestseller and won a Books Are My Bag award, and he was nominated for Best Female Solo Performer at the 2018 Brit Awards. Tempest came out as non-binary in 2020 and as a trans man in 2025.

More recently he released a fifth studio album, Self Titled, in 2025, and a second novel, Having Spent Life Seeking, in 2026, continuing the run of poetry, plays, fiction and records that has defined his output since Sound of Rum.

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