Poet, playwright, novelist, rapper and musician Kae Tempest was born in 1985 in London. He grew up in Brockley as one of five children. At the age of 16, around the same time he started performing at open mic nights around London, he was accepted into the Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology. In 2013, he won the Ted Hughes Award for his poetry collection Brand New Ancients .

He’s released five studio albums, two of which – Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos – have been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. His debut novel The Bricks That Built Houses was released in 2016 to much acclaim, while his play Paradise – a new take on Philoctetes by Sophocles – opened to rave reviews at the National Theatre in 2021.

Tempest came out as non-binary in 2020, then as a

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