Kae Tempest

speaker

343 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 7 May

Kae Tempest’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The Book Show · Kae Tempest and Michael Winkler talk poetry and pooches · 26 Apr 2026 podcast

from the rubble now love is the muscle i train i walk myself home in the rain i know it hurts you when they look at you strange misgender you intentionally use your dead name when they point black refuse you call you confusing assault you in the street until you're hardly moving i adore us i do it all for us our warmth is a portal we're awkward and graceful the place we are from is eternal and what we embody is

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for talking to me about my book.

Yeah, it was attributed to Ted Hughes by the person who shared it with me, who's a fantastic theatre director called Ian Rickson.

But I actually can't find it in any of Ted Hughes's writing.

But he might have read it in a letter or something.

He's the kind of guy that would

you know, have the deep cut of the Ted Hughes lyrical collection.

But something about that resonated with me when I heard it the first time because maybe it reminded me that there was something I had been shying away from, potentially, and that it was time to really go into the wound and really draw from that place.

And there's something about an instruction about how to write that is...

useful and helpful for me, write what you can't bear to admit.

There's something about hearing from somebody else how somebody else has done it that makes me feel excited just to stand on that line and to just join in with that chorus of other people that do this thing with their life, you know.

Yeah, I think it was more just a reminder, you know,

There's something about truth telling that is important in the creation of fiction.

And that might seem like a bit of an anomaly.

How can it be that people that make stuff up for a living have got this, I don't know, this need for it to feel truthful or to be truthful?

Something about...

world of our creation that we make through our fiction or our dramatic writing or our poetry or our lyricism or our songwriting whatever it is that we as writers of um yeah songs plays poems we we use this this artifice to create something that feels more real you know and it and it helps

Other people's songs, poems, plays, music, they're very important to me.

They've saved my life numerous times and they've helped me to arrive more fully in my own experience.

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