Patience Agbabi

Patience Agbabi (born 1965) is a British poet and performer with a particular emphasis on the spoken word. Although her poetry is hard-hitting in addressing contemporary themes, her work often makes use of strong formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as "bi-cultural" and bisexual. and issues of racial, sexual gender identity is important in her poetry.

Agbabi was born in London to Nigerian parents, and grew up in North Wales with an adopted family. She studied English language and literature at Pembroke College, Oxford.

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. Her childhood love of cake is apparent in her poem "Eat Me".

Her latest book, Telling Tales, was published by Canongate in 2014. It revisits Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and 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 who include 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. She is also the author of the poetry collections Bloodshot Monochrome (2008), Transformatrix (2000) and R.A.W (1995), which received the Excelle Literary Award in 1997.

She has performed extensively and in collaboration 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.

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