Patience Agbabi

Bio

Patience Agbabi was born in 1965 in London to Nigerian parents. Although she lived with a white foster family from a young age, she maintained contact with her birth parents as she grew up. At the age of 12, she moved to Colwyn Bay in North Wales with her adoptive parents, to run a bed and breakfast hotel at the seaside. Agbabi read English Language and Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, and in 2002 she graduated from the MA Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. She currently lives in Gravesend, Kent.

Agbabi has published four books of poetry to date as well as publishing her work in journals and anthologies such as Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry (ed. Karen McCarthy, 1998, The Women’s Press); IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (eds. Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay, 2000) and Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (eds. Kwame Dawes and Kadija Sesay, 2010, Peepal Tree). Her first book of poetry, R.A.W. (1995) won the 1997 Excelle Literary Award. Telling Tales (2015), Agbabi’s most recent book of poetry, is a re-telling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for a modern, multicultural Britain (as noted by Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of Cambridge in the blurb for the book). This collection was shortlisted for the 2015 Ted Hughes Poetry Award. In 2017 Agbabi was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

As a performance poet, Agbabi tours extensively. She created the performance piece Fo(u)r Women with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smartt, and between 1995 and 1998 she was a member of “Atomic Lip,” a poetry pop group (with Steve Tasane, Joelle Taylor and The Speech Painter). She frequently appears at literature festivals including the Edinburgh Book Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival and Birmingham Literature Festival, as well as music festivals such as Glastonbury and Soho Jazz. She also tours abroad including work for The British Council such as the “Crossing Borders: New Writing from Africa” project.

Agbabi has taught creative writing at several universities: the University of Greenwich, the University of Wales, Cardiff, the University of Kent at Canterbury and Oxford Brookes University. She also facilitates workshops, most notoriously working as a poet-in-residence at the public school Eton, a post which attracted a lot of media attention. She has also had residences at more unconventional places, such as the London-based tattoo and piercing studio Flamin’ Eight. She is a popular poet for young adult audiences: in 1999 she was commissioned to write a poem for a poetry competition ran by the popular children’s TV show, Blue Peter. Her poem “Josephine Baker Finds Herself” is listed in the anthology of “Poetry By Heart,” a national competition for 14-18 year olds who have to learn and recite poems from memory. (HC & EB)

In 2020, Agbabi published her first children’s novel, The Infinite, for which she won the Wales Book of the Year: Children and Young People Category in 2021. The Infinite is the first instalment of the Leap Cycle series, which follows protagonist Elle and her friends as they go on adventures through time and space in order to take down a group of time-travelling villains. The books deal with important topics such as neurodiversity, ecology, racism, and language. In light of the publication of the series, Agbabi has done a number of (online) school visits and she has also participated in a number of readings and workshops, including with Book Trust, CBBC, International Black Speculative Writing Festival, and Imagine Children’s Festival. At the latter two she launched the final book in her series, The Past Master (2024).  

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