Patience Agbabi

In 2018 she was Writer In Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

In 2017 Agbabi was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In March 2015, The Poetry Society announced Agbabi as one of five poets shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, for her book Telling Tales.

Agbabi was Canterbury Festival's Laureate in 2010.

As Canterbury Laureate from July 2009 to December 2010, Agbabi received an Arts Council grant to write a full-length poetry collection based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and her next book, 2014's Telling Tales, mines the Middle-English masterwork to offer a 21st-century take on the characters, its poetry and its performance elements. The book met with praise from poets including Simon Armitage, who described it as "the liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read." Agbabi continues to tour Telling Tales as a performance-poetry production shown at literature festivals, arts spaces and libraries across the UK.

In 2004, she featured on the Poetry Book Society list of Next Generation poets.

She earned an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education from the University of Sussex in 2002, and in September that year was appointed Associate Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Wales, Cardiff.

In 2000, she was one of ten poets commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a poem for National Poetry Day.

Her poetry has been featured on television and radio, including the Channel 4 series Litpop in 1998 and on the children's programme Blue Peter in 1999. She has also been a contributor to several anthologies, among them Jubilee Lines (2012), edited by Carol Ann Duffy), which marked Queen Elizabeth II's 60th anniversary on the throne, and Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories based on accounts by Gatwick airport detainees.

Agbabi began performing on the London club circuit in 1995. She has cited among her influences Janis Joplin, Carol Ann Duffy, Chaucer, and various aspects of contemporary music and culture. Agbabi's childhood love of cake is apparent in her poem "Eat Me".

The poems in her first book R.A.W., published in 1995, "owe much to the rhythms, verbal and associational genius of rap". Her next collection was Transformatrix (2000), a commentary on contemporary Britain that draws inspiration from popular music forms. In 2008 Agbabi published Bloodshot Monochrome, a collection that, as described by one reviewer, highlights social and political issues, captures and considers moments in time through long-dead authors, and offers readers a diverse sampling of the author's views of life in a variety of places". Carol Rumens has said: "Agbabi characteristically makes poetry an opportunity for conversation with the past, not swamping it but setting new lexical terms."

She has performed extensively and collaborated with other writers. Her work has also been influenced by rap rhythms and wordplay. She was a member of Atomic Lip, which has been described as "poetry's first pop group". They worked together from 1995 to 1998 and their last tour, Quadrophonix (1998) merged live and video performance. In 1996 she worked on a performance piece called FO(U)R WOMEN, with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smartt, first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and which toured from 1995 to 1998.

Agbabi's first poetry collection, R.A.W (1995), received the Excelle Literary Award in 1997.

Patience Agbabi FRSL (born 1965) is a British poet and performer who gives particular emphasis to the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of strong formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as both "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature prominently in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.