They have a command of language and rhythm that makes you listen; makes you care about what they have to say.

Brand New Ancients was a 75-minute-long poem that I told in theatres, scored for a quartet of drums and electronics, violin, cello and tuba. I wrote the poem over a period of many months, in weeklong bursts of intense creativity, and once it was finished and on its feet touring, I saw first-hand that there were things Tempest-the-writer never knew about the writing that Tempest-the-reader discovered each night with increasing clarity. Themes emerged to me, the reader, once I had committed the text to my body and was delivering it to rooms of people. Patterns to the language that I hadn’t been aware of when I was writing. Patterns between characters. I noticed links that helped me intuit meaning and remember the text, because they gave me a sense of why one passage led to another, but I have to say I was not aware of these links in the same way when I was writing. I have found this to be the case with every work I’ve toured since then. The reader undergoes a process of discovery that the writer side of myself is not involved in. This is why I made the decision to record my most recent album, The Book of Traps and Lessons, in one take, after committing it to memory. To try to get as close to that process of discovery as I could. Alexis Petridis (27 July 2017). "2017 Mercury shortlist fails to spotlight truly exciting British music". The Guardian. Sommige hoofdstukken smaken naar 'De meeste mensen deugen' van Rutger Bregman en andere weer naar 'This is water' van David Foster Wallace. Maar heel het boek is een prachtig pleidooi om oprecht te leven en oprecht te zijn ten midden van je omgeving. Een pleidooi om bewust te zijn en mededogen te hebben met jezelf. Geen eisen, geen verplichtingen. Wel de oprechte vraag om het te proberen, steeds opnieuw. Want connectie maken met je omgeving, staat je toe connectie te maken met jezelf. De strijd die Tempest al hun hele leven met zichzelf leveren, is erg herkenbaar. Wat zij daar uit leren en hoe ze dat proberen waar te maken is universeel en helder onder woorden gebracht. Tempest wil niet meer overtuigen, maar gewoon connectie maken. Mensen voelen, aanvoelen, begrijpen en mededogen tonen.That doesn’t mean the adjustment is straightforward. “It’s difficult talking to you,” Tempest admits. “Because I know how this goes. What’ll happen next. Trans people are used in these weird ways to express people’s deep fears about other things; obsessed over by people void of humanity … ” Eyes damp, their pain is palpable. “I don’t understand how my body, our bodies, became a territory for war. These bodies we’ve spent lifetimes living in. It's early February and they're speaking from their apartment in Catford, a gritty district of South London, which has been their lifelong stomping ground. Their latest collection of poems, Running Upon the Wires, was published in September 2018 to critical acclaim (Picador). Their new play Paradise, a retelling of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, is due to be staged at the National Theatre in 2021, having been postponed due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Its play text will be published by Picador. In October 2020, Faber published Kae’s first work of non-fiction, On Connection, a “sonorous, humane polemic, advocating the values of sharing, authenticity and creativity over the heightened individualism, competitiveness and consumerism that dominate our society today… a powerful remedy and an urgent call for change.’

Tempest asks: Who are you, apart from your work achievements and what you can afford in life? Who are you when nobody is watching, when you are brutally honest with yourself, no stage to perform on? I have the impulse of doing the same with "On Connection". Carry it with me, correlate its values with my life, really work through it. I probably can't and won't carry it around with me everywhere (can I tho) but I for sure will read it again and again. It already had a very real impact on my life and I'm curious to see where it leads me.The messages in On Connection are often vague or trite, or both. Tempest talks about putting down our phones and paying attention to the world around us, the dangers of social media, the tragedy of placing monetary value above other types of value, numbness, avoidance - all interesting and relevant topics - but they present no new insights. They start down multiple different paths, none of which lead anywhere. The solutions Tempest offers (be creative, take note of your behavior, etc.) are so vague that I'm not sure I would call them solutions at all. I tried multiple times to give people a general idea of what this book is about, and I failed every time.

Murray, Robin (6 August 2020). "Kate Tempest Changes Name To Kae Tempest". Clash . Retrieved 7 August 2020. Hoewel creativiteit en hun leven als muzikante en woordenaar de rode draad lijken te vormen, gaat het essay over de kunst van het leven. Met vallen. Hard vallen. En weer opstaan. At some point in the book Tempest recalls how they met a homeless person who carried a poetry book with him that connected him with his mother who gave the book to him. It brought him comfort.I was so desperate to make it,” they say, “I really wanted success. So I just ignored it, and carried on. For a long time, my dysphoria was also hidden from me. For the last 10 years, it has been gnawing away at me. The increasing discomfort of: when are you going to do something?” Everybody Down was nominated for the 2015 Mercury Music Prize and Let Them Eat Chaos have been nominated for the 2017 Mercury Music Prize. Their accompanying poetry book Let Them Eat Chaos was nominated for the Costa Book of the Year in the Poetry Category in 2016. They were nominated as Best Female Solo Performer at the 2018 Brit Awards.