About the speaker

Patience Agbabi is a poet much celebrated for paying equal homage to literature and performance. Her work moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage. After reading English at Pembroke College, Oxford, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University. Prominent on the London spoken word circuit since the early nineties, she has toured both with the British Council and independently. Agbabi has lectured in Creative Writing at Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent Universities and her poems and writing are studied in schools and universities. She has participated in residencies from Eton College to Flamin’ Eight, a tattoo studio; from The Historic Dockyard at Chatham to stately home Harewood House. In 2004 she was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her collection, Telling Tales, written during her time as Canterbury Poet Laureate, was published by Canongate in 2014 and was shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry the same year. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In the last four years, Patience has turned her talents to writing a tetralogy for children aged 8 to ∞. The Leap Cycle is a thrilling time-travel adventure series and the debut novel, The Infinite (Canongate, 2020) won the Wales Book of the Year (Children & Young People Award) and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Scottish Teenage Book Prize. The fourth book, The Past Master, was published in Feb 2024. Internationally, Agbabi has performed in the US, Southern Africa and Europe widely, and she had a short residency at Yale earlier this year. The event is supported by Renaissance One.