Kate Tempest is to publish a new collection of “free-standing poetry” including “formal poems, spoken songs, fragments, vignettes and ballads” later this year, her publisher Picador has announced.

Running Upon The Wires is said by the poet to chart “heartbreak from the point of break-up all the way through the messiness and self-destruction and drunkenness into the redemptive nature of new love.

“I thought it was a more useful thing to offer the world to stick with the heartbreak and see it through into hope, rather than have a collection that begins and ends with a break-up. I also thought it was a more interesting proposition that the speaker of the poems moves through pain into new love and then even into domesticity.”

Tempest was born in London in 1985. Her work includes the plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted; the poetry collections Everything Speaks in its Own Way and Hold Your Own; the albums Everybody Down, Balance and Let Them Eat Chaos; the long poems ‘Brand New Ancients’ and ‘Let Them Eat Chaos’; and her debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses.

She was nominated for the Mercury Music prize for both Everybody Down and ‘Let Them Eat Chaos’ and received the Ted Hughes award for ‘Brand New Ancients’. In 2018 she was nominated for a Brit award for Best British Female Solo Artist.

The Bookseller reported that Tempest has sold nearly 70,000 books. Picador’s poetry editor is the award-winning poet Don Paterson.

Background: Judy Gordon reviews Kate Tempest