Kae Tempest sidles into a pub near his house on a weekday afternoon and orders a pint of mineral water. At his side is Murphy, an enormous, 14-year-old alaskan malamute dog with startling blue eyes who settles down on the floor next to his master and goes to sleep. “He’s all right,” Tempest says. “He’s very friendly. He won’t even put his nose up.” The rapper, performance poet, playwright and novelist has a ginger beard and is wearing Timberland boots, baggy jeans and a black hoodie over a blue-and-white striped collared shirt. His hair is hidden by a cap. Years ago, his dramatic russet hair was long, but he cropped it when he dropped the “T” from his first name and came out as nonbinary, a watershed moment in his gender transition. Now testosterone has deepened his voice and his journey has reached its final stage – from they/them to he/him.
As Tempest has been famous since his late 20s, showered with accolades ranging from Mercury nominations for two of his albums (including his debut, Let Them Eat Chaos) to becoming the youngest poet ever to receive the Ted Hughes award for the epic performance poem Brand New Ancients, this odyssey has taken place in public. On his song I Stand on the Line, from his last album Self Titled, Tempest vividly describes the anxiety of having to deal with the hostility of some people’s reactions to his “second puberty” (“Out in the limelight like, please, nobody look at me / I’m looking for myself, all I’m seeing is the bitterness / Coming my way when I’m using the facilities”). So is it a heavy burden to be such a visible trans person? “It’s just my life,” Tempest replies, his voice a soft south London growl, much quieter than the thrilling, declamatory style of his performances. “I’m just glad to be alive. How beautiful,” he adds. “Because you felt like you might not be at some point.”
Tempest’s second novel, Having Spent Life Seeking, is full of characters who are also living precariously on the edge. It tells the story of Rothko, who has returned to Edgecliff, their seaside hometown, having spent 15 years in prison. Rothko’s mother Meg (who gave them their nickname because as a child they used to go as “red as a Rothko”) is a chaotic alcoholic and user of hard drugs; their father, Ezra, is unable to contain the anger and pain within his household. Rothko finds some solace in a teenage love affair with schoolmate Dionne, but it’s complicated by the pair’s society-induced shame about their sexualities and Rothko’s gender identity.
Like Tempest, Rothko is on a voyage of self-discovery, and their pronouns change over the course of the story: they/them for the bulk of the narrative; she/her when being misgendered. “When their pronouns switch in someone else’s imagination or address of them, it’s intentionally a bit of a misstep, you know?” Tempest says. “Hopefully you get that feeling of missing a step on the stairs, which is how it feels.” Rothko’s pronouns give rise to grammatically unconventional sentences like: “It was their first heartbreak. And they’d done it to themself.” “That’s just how it feels to me,” Tempest says. “It doesn’t feel like ‘themselves’.” He is proud of a euphoric moment towards the end of the novel when Rothko says “I’m a man” and is thereafter referred to as he/him, which Tempest describes as “the power of a new pronoun … I would hope that people that have no experience of anything remotely like this will feel the relief and release for that character.”
As readers of his 2020 book-length essay On Connection will know, Tempest is a fervent believer in the power of art and literature to make us experience the inner lives of people with whom we might think we have nothing in common – and also, he tells me, “to make us see more clearly our own internal experience”. His touchstones when writing Having Spent Life Seeking included Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (“You don’t spend much time with the characters, but they walk on and off and you know so much about them”) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a classic but frustratingly hard-to-find queer bildungsroman about a gender nonconforming lesbian. “When I first encountered that text it was probably the first step of my journey towards accepting myself as I really was.”
Having Spent Life Seeking will surely take its place alongside it in the trans canon, but Tempest wants to reach a wider audience too. “For sure it’s for us,” he says, meaning the trans community, adding that the book’s early trans and genderqueer readers have reacted with “lots of crying because of the recognition, the feeling that ‘I’ve never seen myself like that’”. But, he adds, “I hope that there is something in Rothko that can resonate far beyond their gender in the same way that you can read For Whom the Bell Tolls and it doesn’t matter that the characters are male or female.”
Having Spent Life Seeking comes a full decade after Tempest’s first novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, which sold well and got decent reviews, although Alex Clark in the Guardian noted an unevenness of tone, saying: “When Tempest’s angst-ridden lyricism is let off the leash, the effect is thrilling … But when that poetry is absent the dreary business of narrative comes to grief.” Today, Tempest says that writing novels is tough as they are big and difficult to approach (“It took writing the first one to work out what the fuck to do”). Though in all his work – which now also encompasses four plays, five albums and six volumes of poetry, all by the age of 40 – Tempest says that he usually learns on the job.
He wrote a second novel, but his then publisher turned it down, because the book, Tempest explains, “was pretty dark. It was quite a heavy thing.” Other forms of work started to claim his time, including Paradise, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes directed by Ian Rickson, which was the first play the National Theatre staged on reopening after Covid. Tempest also met his partner there; she is the subject of Sunshine on Catford, a wonderfully ecstatic love song on Self Titled.
Self Titled’s lyrics discuss Tempest’s transition in detail; he and it were the subject of a 2023 episode of the BBC’s arts documentary Arena, which culminates in a tender scene in which he and his partner are filmed in the bath after Tempest had top surgery. As a child, he says, he felt free to be himself, but as he raps on Breathe: “I used to be a boy when I was young / Hit puberty then I had to be a girl.” Prodigious writing and rapping offered a way to alleviate the misery of his gender dysphoria, but by the age of 35 he was suffering such severe panic attacks that he could barely get on stage, which was the catalyst for him to start the transitioning process.
Having Spent Life Seeking came out of this period of tumult. Tempest says that writing it took about three years, first at a friend’s house (Tempest realised later that there was a Rothko poster in the room where he was staying) and later in two artists’ residencies in Italy and Spain. He submitted the first draft in November 2023, during the second week of a European tour. One version of the book was twice as long as the final novel, which comes in at 338 pages – he cut an entire section dedicated to a character who no longer appears. “I put everything into it – everything,” Tempest says. “And it gave everything to me. It kept me going through some really heavy stuff. I just love it. I’m so proud of it. I really can’t wait for people to meet these characters.”
Tempest regards his own creativity as a life force, something that has given him purpose, even when everything else seemed to be falling apart. “I have this relationship of wonder and gratitude for what mysterious power it is to make music, to write poems, to write lyrics,” he says. “No matter what I was going through as a person, as an artist I had a way to exist in the world that made sense to me.” He adds: “I don’t process trauma through what I make. But the fact is that everything is filtered through this lens. How beautiful to have that. So many people I know don’t have the capacity to express or reflect on life through their creativity.” He mentions Bessel van der Kolk’s famous book The Body Keeps the Score, which discusses the case of a five-year-old who witnessed the destruction in New York on 9/11, and later drew a picture of a trampoline next to the Twin Towers. “So that kid was not traumatised because they used their creative imagination to give these people a way out.”
Tempest gives a great deal of himself in his work, which may be why he has often been a reluctant interviewee – he would rather share intimate experiences on his own terms. In conversation, he does his best to avoid specifics, turning questions about them into discussions of his work. I ask whether the lyrics of Bless the Bold Future, another song on Self Titled, mean that he doesn’t want to have children, and he tells me that I’ve misinterpreted it. “It’s an address to the spirit world asking an unborn baby to stay where it is because it’s so fucking grim here,” he says. “But that song says, if you want to be here, fine. I will wash myself in the waters and make myself pure for you.” He’s paraphrasing a verse from the song which concludes: “I will do what a human is born to do / Lay my life down / To make sure home is warm for you.”
There’s also drug use, which is ubiquitous in Having Spent Life Seeking, and also in Tempest’s lyrics – one of his old songs is called Ketamine for Breakfast, while Breathe describes him helplessly watching someone get stabbed while he’s high at a rave. In On Connection, he writes that he was a drug and alcohol user from the age of 12 or 13 “to cope with a difficult brain, problems at home and gender dysphoria ”. He reveals that he was a drug dealer and had a period “sleeping in churchyards with my best mate and his heroin addiction”.
With lived experiences like these, it’s not surprising that Having Spent Life Seeking can be harrowing. “I’m not making any judgment,” Tempest says, of his stories of abuse and addiction. “Euphoric abandonment when you have something to escape is profound. But Rothko gets to a place where they want to arrive rather than escape, which is profound in a different way.” Towards the end of a book in which he has both overdosed on painkillers stolen from a cancer sufferer and been introduced to crack in horrific circumstances, Rothko dances happily sober at a queer rave.
Tempest does his best to fathom every aspect of his characters’ lives. His novel’s sex scenes are pivotal and detailed: I’d never read anything quite like the sequence which follows the teenage Rothko and Dionne from a sex shop, where they buy the necessary toys, into bed. “How wonderful,” Tempest replies. Was it important for him to write explicitly about trans masc/cis female intercourse? “Fucking hell, I wouldn’t describe it like that,” he splutters. “Sexuality is a life force. It’s very important. It’s not meant to be explicit. Writing about sex can be kind of awkward, but I hope that it doesn’t jar you out of the character. I remember talking to Ian Rickson when I was working on Paradise and he said that in order for an audience to feel pathos, there have to be five worlds activated in the character: the wider world of the gods, the heart world of the person, the gut world of my story, my vengeance, my pain, and there has to be love, or eros. There has to be romance, and that’s how we can recognise that a character is a full person. It’s an important part of knowing someone and knowing ourselves.”
It all comes back to that sense of connection, achieved through acts of the imagination. Tempest is eloquent and compelling on the subject of what books have done for him, and certain that his words can do the same things for others. “When I’ve been most lost, I’ve felt myself realigned by encounters with novels,” he says. “It’s been so profound for me what books have done to me in my life, this electric sense of reconnection that I’ve encountered when I’ve been at my most disconnected.
“So I feel, that because I’ve received so much from literature and from music, I stand on this line. And on this line, going back, are all the writers whose works have reached me and all the poets whose words have found me. I put myself on that line and I feel them charging up through my back. And because I can feel that charge, I can transmit it. Because I’ve received it, I can give it. So when I start to feel any doubt or anxiety or fear or overwhelm about any aspect of my creative life, I put myself on that line and visualise the line continuing, and I know that someone will receive this because I have – and I’m giving in the spirit that I have received. In the humblest spirit, that’s what I feel.” And even Murphy pricks up his ears.
• Having Spent Life Seeking is published by Jonathan Cape on 30 April. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
