Perfect storm. Thundering success. It never rains but it pours. Lightning strikes twice. Yep, the meteorological puns and weather-based wordplay were out in force last week with the news that street poet, rapper, playwright and impossible-to-pigeonhole polymath Kate Tempest had achieved an unprecedented double.
On Wednesday, it was announced that her hip-hop album Everybody Down had been shortlisted for the Mercury prize. The next day it was revealed that Tempest had been selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of 20 next generation poets, a prestigious list picked just once per decade. The 27-year-old is the youngest of the crop and described herself as "humbled, terrified and proud", adding: "Bit bonkers, isn't it?"
This all comes the year after Tempest scooped the Ted Hughes award for innovation in poetry (the first person under 40 to win it), the Off-West End Theatre award (aka "the Offies") and a Herald Angel award at the Edinburgh fringe. Her mantelpiece in south-east London must be positively groaning.
Kate Esther Tempest is an overnight success a decade in the making. Born in 1986, she was one of five children born in Brockley to "a lovely family in a good home but in a shitty part of town". She still lives there and recently tweeted: "South-east London, I live and breathe to make you proud of me."
Her father was a labourer, who by night studied to be a criminal lawyer and now has his own practice, where one of Tempest's brothers works alongside him. "I think he always hoped I'd get into it too but I'm interested in different kinds of laws," she smiles. Pa Tempest passed down his creative gene, though – he paints, writes poetry and even does glassblowing.
Tempest admits she had a "wayward youth", living in squats, getting tattoos and loitering in chicken shops. Unhappy at an inner-city comprehensive, where the teachers "hated intelligent kids", and as unruly as her tumbling, rust-coloured curls, she left with no A-levels but hails her English teacher (big up, Mr Bradshaw, if you're reading) as an encouraging influence who read her early attempts at "awful adolescent poetry" and gave the gobby teen books to inspire her: Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, WB Yeats, WH Auden, William Blake, James Joyce. These venerable names appear in her list of influences alongside Bob Dylan (her dad's favourite) and the Wu-Tang Clan (her own).
Fierce and shy at the same time, she whispered her first rap down the phone to a friend, then began freestyling at strangers on night buses and "hanging around on picket lines, rapping at riot cops". "I had such an urgency and passion for rapping that I'd rap at anybody," she says. "I'd rap at bouncers outside clubs, persuading them to let me in because I was underage."
She describes the 2003 anti-Iraq war demo as a defining moment, distilling her disillusionment and driving her to air her ideas in public: "It made me very angry and politically engaged." She took the plunge at open-mic nights and went on to support spoken-word artists John Cooper Clarke, Benjamin Zephaniah and Scroobius Pip.
"The first time I performed was in Deal Real, a small hip-hop record shop on Carnaby Street, standing on an upturned crate," Tempest recalls. Her friends encouraged her to the front of the room, which was packed with hardcore rap fans. "And up I come, looking about eight years old in baggy clothes and duffle coat, all ginger hair and glasses. I looked like Harry Potter. I did my one little verse and the place just went nuts. That defined the next few years for me. I could not be shut up."
Realising with an energising jolt that she'd found her vocation, Tempest studied music at the Brit school and poetry at Goldsmiths College: "I completely fell in love with the idea that this was something that I could do."
She developed her craft on the spoken-word scene, determinedly converting new fans and taking festival tents by, ahem, storm. She performed everywhere from Glastonbury to Yale University, the Royal Opera House to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where she won two slams.
She started playing rap gigs with her band Sound of Rum, while getting poetry commissions from the BBC, Barnardo's and the Royal Shakespeare Company, for which she filmed spoken-word pieces about the bard. "Stunning," enthused the Economist. "They come bursting off the screen. Rarely has the relevance of Shakespeare to our language, to the very fabric of our feelings, been expressed with quite such youthful passion. It should be mandatory viewing for all teenagers."
Her first volume of poetry, Everything Speaks in Its Own Way, resulted in her being approached by celebrated production company Paines Plough to write a piece of theatre. "At first I was like, 'No way.' I was so intimidated by the form. I'd read plays but I'd never really been to the theatre." Of course, she took the work on, learning to thrive in a new form. The result was her first play, Wasted, which completed two nationwide tours and two sellout runs at London's Roundhouse.
This was followed by gritty narrative poem Brand New Ancients, a kitchen-sink epic with orchestral backing, which draws parallels between the battles of everyday people and those of classical gods. It opened two years ago at the Battersea Arts Centre to rave reviews and the Guardian's theatre critic Lyn Gardner described Tempest as "a genuinely galvanising presence and acutely responsive to her audience".
The work won the Ted Hughes award even without Tempest's charismatic live delivery – the judges heard a recorded version but were still unanimous in their decision.
The common thread through Tempest's diverse work is her love of words. In mesmerising rhyme and galloping rhythm, her passion for the classics collides with urban street slang, social observation, consumerism and the concerns of contemporary youth. As she writes in her song Lonely Daze: "I can see here that you have a degree/Yes, says Pete, in international relations/Great, let's see if Primark has space for a placement."
The 12 tracks on Everybody Down are "chapters" in a story about mates stumbling through London life, trying to find love, look cool and keep up with the rent. She raps in her own accent, not the generic American that too many homegrown rappers still slip into. "I love London," she says. "It made me, took care of me and taught me everything I know. And scared the life out of me too. I like to think it's OK to be who you are. It's important to be real when you go on stage."
The Irish Times described her as "Mike Skinner of the Streets channelling the lines of Allen Ginsberg's Howl" and she is indeed slippery to categorise, straddling genres without being bothered by the boundaries between them. The Guardian said: "Her spoken-word performances have the metre and craft of traditional poetry, the kinetic agitation of hip-hop and the intimacy of a whispered heart-to-heart."
Musically, she's collaborated with Sinead O'Connor and Bastille. A blistering live session for Lauren Laverne's 6 Music show this summer – accompanied by an endearingly enthusiastic interview – elicited record reaction from listeners, inspired by Tempest's heartfelt passion for what she does (complete with accidental dropping of the f-word) as much as they were chair-dancing along to her tunes.
Famous fans include Billy Bragg, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, Woman's Hour host Jenni Murray (who called her "breathtakingly fantastic") and fellow south-of-the-river rapper Roots Manuva ("her works are truly of upliftment and betterment"). A certain Simon Cowell is unlikely to be joining their ranks – the X Factor overlord is lambasted as a "false god" in Brand New Ancients. Then again, the smirking svengali might just like that.
It's all getting hectic for Tempest but that's how this workaholic likes it, fuelled by her words, her wits and her roll-ups. "I still get asked for ID when I buy tobacco – but I also get half fare on trains and buses," laughs the baby-faced bright young thing. She's currently on a poetry reading tour ahead of her next collection, Hold Your Own, being published by Picador in October. She embarks on a rap tour in November and is also expanding Everybody Down into a companion novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, expected next year.
Bookmakers have installed her as 4/1 second favourite for the Mercury prize. Winning has been a career-stalling curse for female rappers in the past – see 2002's Ms Dynamite and 2009's Speech Debelle – but should Tempest triumph at next month's ceremony, it's unlikely to have the same effect on her.
To quote the Shakespeare play with which Tempest shares her surname: "O, brave new world, that has such people in't."
