Think Again - a Big Think Podcast 47. Kate Tempest (rapper/poet/novelist): Lost and Found in South London
"When you’re writing a novel, it’s agony. It’s complete agony. It’s a horrible thing to put yourself through. All of the instinctive kind of rushes of creativity, the energized outpourings, anybody can do that. That’s not what makes you a writer. The bit of this job that makes you a writer is when you don’t feel like that. When you feel like you never deserved to even imagine that you could have been a writer. When you hate every word that you’ve made. When you doubt every single part of your brain. To sit down in that space and work because you’ve got a deadline to meet, because you’ve got a novel to write. You know to ignore your brain in that moment, because your brain is defeating you. You have to be able to trust your hand."
– Kate Tempest, in this episode
Kate Tempest is a force of nature. She won the coveted Ted Hughes award for her epic poem Brand New Ancients, which she toured internationally as a stage show to massive critical acclaim. Her novelistic 2014 rap album Everybody Down takes hip-hop in entirely new directions. And with 2016's The Bricks That Built the Houses, she has reworked these ideas into a deeply moving and powerful novel (her first) about four friends in her native South London.
Our conversation starts here, with the challenges and discipline of novel-writing and travels through deep and personal territory, as Kate talks passionately about art and the human heart in our "tragic and troubling times".
NOT TO BE MISSED: Kate's breathtaking, spontaneous poetic monologue at the very end of the show.
On this week's episode of Think Again - A Big Think Podcast, Kate and host Jason Gots go deep into these topics and more.
Surprise discussion clips in this episode: Augusten Burroughs on writer's block and William Shatner on science and imagination.
Kate Tempest song sampled in the show: Europe is Lost
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