Patience Agbabi | Arvon

Patience Agbabi

Patience Agbabi FRSL is a celebrated poet best known for her fourth collection, Telling Tales, an exuberant retelling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Now she has turned her talents to writing for children aged 8 to ∞. The Leap Cycle is a thrilling time-travel adventure series. Her debut novel, The Infinite, was CBBC Book of the Month for July 2020 and was recently longlisted for the Branford Boase Award 2021. Philip Pullman said of it: ‘Vivid, funny, exciting and inventive…Patience Agbabi has created something fresh and original here, and I look forward very much to what she writes next.’ The sequel, The Time-Thief, is fresh off the press in May 2021.

“My one and only Arvon course was at Lumb Bank. I was taught by Kwame Dawes and Sarah Maguire and the guest was Michael Donaghy (after CK Williams cancelled). I couldn’t have wished for a better set of poets to help me make that leap from stage to page. I already a first raw collection out there, R.A.W., but was becoming more literary and wanted feedback on a sestina project that was eventually published in my second book Transformatrix. Transformatrix enabled me to be one of the 20 Next Generation Poets in 2004. So yes, Arvon was central to that turning point, that eureka moment, when I embraced traditional poetic forms with a contemporary twist.” – Patience Agbabi