Michael Pedersen & Kae Tempest

We're so excited to welcome Michael Pedersen and Kae Tempest to the bookshop for a conversation on friendship and connection. Michael and Kae's latest books (Boy Friends and On Connection) are published by Faber & Faber and both writers worked with the same wonderful editor, Alexa von Hirschberg.

Kae Tempest on Boy Friends:

'Michael writes with true sensitivity and power. His words burrow down to the core of it all while at the same time offering the soaring perspective of the poet-soul. Deeply felt, carefully crafted, his language firing with pace and wit. A master of words. He plays them like music.’

Michael Pedersen on Kae Tempest:

'Kae is one of the most vital writers of our generation — sapient, stirring, spiritual, sensational. They write with a trenchant tenderness and a heartfelt desire to love and learn. The words, like the human behind them, truly coruscate.'

In-person vouchers can be used on the night of the event against anything in the bookshop – we will have a list of attendee vouchers at the ready. Livestream vouchers are valid until the day after the event and can be used on the website against the price of Boy Friends or On Connection.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author. His second collection, Oyster (2017), was a collaboration with Scott Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit). Pedersen has been named a Canongate Future 40, was a finalist in 2018 for Writer of the Year at the Herald Scottish Culture Awards, was awarded the John Mather Trust Rising Star of Literature Award and won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Pedersen also co-founded Neu! Reekie!, a prize-winning arts collective known for producing cutting-edge shows across Scotland and the world.

Kae Tempest is a poet. They are also a writer, a lyricist, a performer and a recording artist. They have published plays, poems, a novel, a book length non-fiction essay (On Connection), released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. They received Mercury Music Prize nominations for both of the albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos and two Ivor Novello nominations for their song-writing on The Book of Traps and Lessons. They were named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, a once in a decade accolade. They received the Ted Hughes Award for their longform narrative poem Brand New Ancients and the Leone D'Argento at the Venice Teatro Biennale for their work as a playwright. Their books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. They were born in London in 1985 where they still live.

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