CANCELLED – Aerial presents: Kate Tempest at St Mary’s Church

Kate Tempest’s latest spoken word show, Telling Poems, has been touring the country to sell-out audiences, and this is your chance to catch her in the Gothic Revival surrounds of St Mary’s Church, Ambleside.

Fresh from taking her third music album The Book of Traps And Lessons – featuring New York Times favourite Unholy Elixir – to Australia and New Zealand, Tempest is back in the UK showcasing the poetry string in her burgeoning bow. Described as a “ground-breaking” and “spellbinding” spoken word performer and poet, in 2014 she was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets, a once-a-decade accolade, so not due for renewal for another four years.

Apt that this latest spoken word show by Kate Tempest, here at the Lake District’s first-ever Aerial Festival, is in a place of worship

Having made her live debut as a spoken-word artist aged 16, her work started to get published in her twenties. With five poetry collections under her belt since 2012 debut Everything Speaks In Its Own Way, Kate Tempest won the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry for her second, the “verse epic” Brand New Ancients, while her 2014 Picador-published Hold Your Own – a reworking of the myth of blinded prophet Tiresias – was critically acclaimed. The Independent said: “Tempest has forged her own voice, unlike anything else in the mainstream poetry world.”

She was nominated for the Costa Book of the Year in the Poetry Category with her fourth collection, 2016’s Let Them Eat Chaos; the accompanying album of which was her second album to be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize (the first being her debut, Everybody Down). Wearing her recording artist hat, she was nominated as Best Female Solo Performer at the 2018 Brit Awards, and she has also written two plays, Wasted and Hopefully Devoted (both published by Methuen), along with the novel The Bricks That Built The Houses (Bloomsbury, 2016), which was a Sunday Times bestseller. Her most recent collection, Running Upon The Wires, came out in 2018.

The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner said of spoken word show Brand New Ancients: “It feels as if we are not in a theatre but a church […] hearing the age-old stories that help us make sense of our lives. We’re given the sense that what we are watching is something sacred.” Apt, then, that this latest spoken word show by Kate Tempest, here at the Lake District’s first-ever Aerial Festival, is in a place of worship.

Read our guide to Literary Places in Cumbria.