Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest is an English spoken-word performer, poet, recording artist, novelist and playwright. She was nominated as Best Female Solo Performer at the 2018 Brit Awards. She has been published in nine languages.

In 2013, she won the Ted Hughes Award for her work Brand New Ancients, the first person under the age of 40 to win the award.  She was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society, a once-a-decade accolade. 

Her albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos have been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. The latter's accompanying poetry book (also titled Let Them Eat Chaos) was nominated for the Costa Book of the Year in the Poetry Category. However, since the release of Everybody Down in 2014, Tempest has increasingly toured as a musician, playing at festivals and headlining shows with her live band which consists of Kwake Bass on drums, Dan Carey on synths and Clare Uchima on keyboards.

Her debut novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Breakthrough Author.

This 2020 video, directed, edited, produced by Natalya Lobanova, is the "official visualizer" for the song Unholy Elixir and features a different performance of the song than that on her 2019 album, The Book of Traps and Lessons.   The album version closes with an additional verse not on the video containing the words:

I came to
Under a domed roof.
The lights was cold and clear and fragmented.
There was people, moving.
I watched them.
I saw a muscle of school girls performing.
I saw the ticket woman massaging the small of her back
And the young gent, neat as a crease in his work clothes,
And the light, light as breath on the dirty, old track.