Patience Agbabi is a celebrated poet and a writer of middle grade novels whose work spans both page and performance. Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in North Wales, Agbabi credits her ‘bicultural’ upbringing for the outlook in her work. After reading English at Oxford University, and completing an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University, Agbabi rose to prominence as a poet on the 1990s spoken word circuit, and in 1995, her groundbreaking debut poetry collection R.A.W was published. In 1997, R.A.W. won the Excelle Literary Award, and since then Agbabi has written and toured extensively, published several collections, and been the writer-in-residence at a range of institutions spanning Eton College, Oxford Brookes University, and the ‘Flamin Eight’ tattoo parlour. In 2004 she was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Praised for her use of poetic forms, Agbabi’s poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. Her other poetry collections include Transformatrix (2000), Bloodshot Monochrome (2008), and Telling Tales (2014) which was celebrated for its 21st century retelling and reimagining of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for a new generation of readers Her two books for middle graders, The Infinite (2020) and The Time Thief (2021), are part of a quartet series that touch on neurodiversity, time travel and the environment. The Infinite won Wales Book of the Year 2021 and was shortlisted for the Clark Award for Science Fiction and the Scottish Teenage Book Prize. Agbabi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017.
