Kate Tempest

Roger McGough is joined by Kate Tempest, who shares a selection of her favourite poems from the Poetry Please archive of listeners' requests.

A playwright, poet, novelist and spoken word artist who began performing when she left school at the age of 16, Kate Tempest has gone from performing to strangers on buses to winning accolades including being the youngest winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry with her piece, Brand New Ancients in 2013, and she was selected as one of the 2014 Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Society, a once-in-a-decade award. She's been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and won Best Female Solo Performer at The Brits for her music. Equally influenced by Joyce, Bukowski, Blake and the Wu-Tang Clan she has a musical sense of language, bridging the worlds of rap and traditional lyric verse.

She joins Roger on the publication of her new collection of poetry, Running Upon The Wires (Picador) with poem choices including Wislawa Szymborska, Yusef Komunyakaa, Zia Ahmed, Sharon Olds, Christopher Logue, Langston Hughes and readings by Kim Moore and one of the children from the anthology, Poems From A School, Maah Noor Ali.

Producer: Sarah Addezio.