Born in south-east London where he still lives, Kae Tempest made his live debut as a spoken-word artist at sixteen. Having initially conceived of himself as a rapper, Tempest found his work was also extremely popular at poetry slams; he…

James Fenton (b. 1949) grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire and was educated at Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence ‘Our Western Furniture’. This early poem about the cultural collision…