Patience Agbabi

Patience Agbabi is a poet, performer and workshop facilitator. She was born in London in 1965 to Nigerian parents and spent her teenage years living in North Wales. She was educated at Oxford University and has appeared at numerous diverse venues in the UK and abroad.

R.A.W., her groundbreaking debut collection of poetry, was published in 1995, and won the 1997 Excelle Literary Award. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. Transformatrix, a commentary on late twentieth-century Britain and a celebration of poetic form, was published in 2000. It received excellent reviews in publications including the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and Poetry Review.

She has also worked extensively for The British Council, delivering her work in a range of venues from university lecture theatres to a metro station, in countries including Namibia, 1999, the Czech Republic, 2000, Zimbabwe and Germany, 2001, and Switzerland, 2002.

Patience Agbabi lives in Gravesend, Kent. In 2004 she was named as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Next Generation’ poets. Her most recent collection is Bloodshot Monochrome (2008). She is published by Canongate.

These video recordings were made by the English and Media Centre in January 2010.

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