An Evening with Kae Tempest (Part One)

In this live event recorded at St George's Bristol, poet, musician, and author Kae Tempest engages in a profound and intimate conversation with writer Danielle Wilde about their highly anticipated return to fiction with their first novel in a decade. Tempest reflects on the creative process behind the novel, emphasizing how fiction allowed them to build a deeply realized world where characters exist across multiple timelines, shaped by time, memory, and emotional truth. Drawing on their background in poetry and music, Tempest describes writing as a form of musical conducting—orchestrating time, rhythm, and emotional resonance across decades of personal and familial history. The novel’s structure, which shifts from prose to a lyrical verse section to convey the passage of 20 years, is framed as a deliberate artistic choice to honor the beauty and complexity of life, even in its most painful moments. Tempest also discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the work—particularly the distinction between forgiveness and atonement, the power of repeated action in shaping identity, and the refusal to define people by their worst days. The conversation culminates in a moving exploration of the character Angel, who serves as both a wound and a counterbalance to the protagonist Rothko’s journey toward selfhood and redemption. Throughout, Tempest reveals a deeply human, self-aware creative process—one rooted in trial, error, and the courage to let characters live beyond the author’s initial expectations.