Patience Agbabi

Patience Agbabi FRSL is a sought-after poet, performer and novelist. Her work often gives voice to the voiceless, bridging the gap between high art and popular culture, poetry and prose, paying equal attention to formal structure and the dynamic of performance.
She read English Language and Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford and has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education from the University of Sussex. She received honorary doctorates from the University of Worcester (2016) and The University of Kent (2019). She has lectured in Creative Writing at Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent Universities and since 2008 has been a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.
In 2004 she was nominated one of the UK’s ‘Next Generation Poets’. Agbabi was Canterbury Laureate from 2009 to 2010 and received a Grant for the Arts and an Authors Foundation Grant to write a contemporary version of The Canterbury Tales. This fourth collection, Telling Tales, was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and Wales Book of the Year 2015. In 2016, her poem ‘The Refugee’s Tale’ appeared in The Refugee Tales (Comma Press, 2016) and she participates in the annual walk to raise awareness around asylum seekers’ issues.
Agbabi’s debut, middle-grade novel The Infinite (Canongate, 2020), is the first of the Leap Cycle. The sequel: The Time-Thief is due in 2021.