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Kae Tempest

British poet, spoken word artist and playwright

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ6375824
Source-derived summary

Kae Tempest (born 1985), formerly Kate Tempest, is an English spoken word performer, poet, recording artist, novelist, and playwright. As of 2026 he has released seven studio albums and many singles, as well as many collections of poetry, several plays, two novels, and one work of non-fiction. He has performed around the world, on tours and at festivals. Tempest came out as non-binary in 2020, then as a trans man in 2025.

Tempest attended the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in Croydon, and began to perform under the moniker "Excentral Tempest". From 2008 until around 2011, he performed as a rapper along with two musicians in the band Sound of Rum. In 2013, he won the Ted Hughes Award for his work Brand New Ancients, and was named a Next Generation poet in 2014 by the Poetry Book Society. Tempest's albums Everybody Down (2014) and Let Them Eat Chaos (2016) were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, and the poetry book titled Let Them Eat Chaos was nominated for the Costa Book of the Year in the Poetry category. His debut novel The Bricks That Built the Houses (2016) was a Sunday Times best-seller and won the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers' Award for Breakthrough Author. He was nominated as Best Female Solo Performer at the 2018 Brit Awards.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kae Tempest” as british poet, spoken word artist and playwright. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1985, 2026, 2020, 2025—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—1985-12-22, 1985-01-01—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. The account is most persuasive where Tempest, British and poet can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british poet, spoken word artist and playwright. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6375824. VIAF identifies the subject as 289473501. The Library of Congress control number is nb2012027563. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2026, 2020 and 2025.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Kae Tempest”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Kae Tempest primary sources, Kae Tempest archive and Tempest research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Kae Tempest”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Kae Tempest” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.