The Economist said of Tempest's commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company: "A stunning piece by [Kae] Tempest, a London-born performance poet, comes bursting off the screen. Rarely has the relevance of Shakespeare to our language, to the very fabric of our feelings, been expressed with quite such youthful passion. (It should be mandatory viewing for all teenagers.)" The
Huffington Post describes him as "Britain's leading young poet, playwright and rapper...one of the most widely respected performers in the country – the complete package of lyrics and delivery. [He is] also one of the most exciting young writers working in Britain today" (2012).
The Guardian commented of
Brand New Ancients, "Suddenly it feels as if we are not in a theatre but a church... gathered around a hearth, 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." In 2013, the newspaper noted: [He is] one of the brightest talents around. [His] spoken-word performances have the metre and craft of traditional poetry, the kinetic agitation of hip-hop and the intimacy of a whispered heart-to-heart... Tempest deals bravely with poverty, class and consumerism. [He does] so in a way that not only avoids the pitfalls of sounding trite, but manages to be beautiful too, drawing on ancient mythology and sermonic cadence to tell stories of the everyday. In 2013, aged 28, he won the
Ted Hughes Award for his work
Brand New Ancients, the first person under the age of 40 to win the award, and was selected as one of the 2014 Next Generation Poets by the
Poetry Society. Tempest has received wide critical acclaim for his written and live work. A performance of
Brand New Ancients prompted the New York Times to say "As gorgeous streams of words flow out, [he conjures] a story so vivid it’s as if you had a state-of-the-art Blu-ray player stuffed into your brain, projecting image after image that sears itself into your consciousness" while a review by Michiko Kakutani of his poetry collections in the same paper explored their written style: “While [his] intense performances on stage add a fierce urgency to the words, these text versions of [his] work stand powerfully on their own on the page...using [his] pictorial imagination to sear specific images into the reader's mind". He has been published in nine languages.
Everybody Down was nominated for the 2015 Mercury Music Prize and
Let Them Eat Chaos have been nominated for the 2017 Mercury Music Prize. His accompanying poetry book
Let Them Eat Chaos was nominated for the Costa Book of the Year in the Poetry Category in 2016. At the 2018 Brit Awards, he was nominated as
Best Female Solo Performer. ==Publications==