List Of Writers

AGBABI, PATIENCE

Patience Agbabi is a poet, performer and workshop facilitator. Patience Agbabi was born in London in 1965 to Nigerian parents. She spent her teenage years living in North Wales. She read English Language and Literature at Oxford University. She lives in Gravesend, Kent.

Her groundbreaking debut collection of poetry R.A.W. (Gecko Press)was published in 1995, and won the 1997 Excelle Literary Award. Her most recent collection, Transformatrix, (Payback Press) was published in 2000. Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, (Hamish Hamilton, 2000). She was appointed poet in residence at Eton College from February to March 2005.

Patience Agbabi is renowned for the raw energy of both her writing and performance. Primarily a solo performer, she tours extensively, and has read at key literature festivals in the UK. In 2004, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets.

Now working at the University of Kent, Patience was Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Cardiff (2002–2004); Programme Leader in Creative Writing at University of Greenwich (2002–2003); and Poet-in-Residence at Oxford Brookes University in 2001. She has a BA in English (Oxford) and MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education (University of Sussex). Work in progress includes a third collection, Body Language. Patience has performed and taught extensively in the UK , Europe and Africa with The British Council. She was co-judge of the 2005 Forward Prize for Poetry.

Selected Publications:
Raw (Gecko Press, 1995)
Transformatrix (Payback Press, 2000)
Bloodshot Monochrome (Canongate Books, 2008)

Contributed to:
Trees in the City: Poems About the Need for Action on Climate Change (contributor) (Axon Publishing, 2007)