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Patience Agbabi

Poetry Arena

Thursday 16th July, 2009
20:30 - 21:00

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 over the last twelve years.

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.

Her most recent work, Bloodshot Monochrome, is a glorious poetic take on all things black, white and read. Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Agbabi's verse is sublimely lyrical and spiked with gleeful humour.

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.

Her work has also appeared on television and radio. In 1998 her work was featured on Channel 4's Litpop series and she was commissioned by the BBC to write a poem for the Blue Peter National Children's Poetry Competition in 1999.

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