LONDON — Kate Tempest — poet, playwright, rapper, cross-genre talent — took to the stage at Electric Brixton, a club in the historically working class neighborhood one recent Sunday night, and looked into the crowd of more than a thousand people. “I don’t want to see you hidden behind your phone screens!” she called out in her unmistakable South London accent. “This is real! This is happening!” Being together in one room, living the same moment, she said, is “as close to connecting” as many of us ever achieve.
An insistence on connection and revealing quiet moments of beauty in the lives of Londoners — many of them struggling to stay afloat in economic uncertainty — is at the heart of Ms. Tempest’s work. Citing both the poet William Blake and the rapper RZA among her influences, she is a powerful mix of innocence and experience with a growing, and fervent, following.
“Her performances are incendiary,” said the singer Billy Bragg, who in 2010 invited her to participate in the Glastonbury performing arts festival. “She wasn’t just singing or rapping. She was telling you stuff like her life depended on your understanding what she was saying.”
After a breakthrough year in Britain, Ms. Tempest, 29, is taking her unusual blend of music and poetry to the United States, kicking off a two-month nationwide tour this month with performances in Los Angeles, the South by Southwest festival, and New York, where she will appear at the Mercury Lounge on March 24 and read at Word bookstore on March 26.
The tour is to promote her debut album, “Everybody Down,” a narrative in rap that came out worldwide last May and was nominated for a Mercury Prize as Album of the Year, and her poetry collection, “Hold Your Own,” which Bloomsbury will publish in the United States on Tuesday. (It came out in Britain last fall.)
New York audiences got their first glimpse of this high-energy performer when St. Ann’s Warehouse mounted her play “Brand New Ancients” last January. The show reimagines the Greek gods as ordinary Londoners through the tales of two interconnected families. Charles Isherwood in The New York Timescalled it “a story so vivid it’s as if you had a state-of-the-art Blu-ray player stuffed into your brain.”
The way Ms. Tempest’s work jumps boundaries is reflected in the awards she has received. Last year, she was named one of Britain’s 20 Next Generation poets, and “Brand New Ancients” won the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry. Then came the Mercury nomination, for music.
“Everything’s been crazy,” Ms. Tempest said over a coffee at Soho House, the artsy private club, the day after her Brixton show, adding an expletive for effect. She laughed a bit at the notion that she had come out of nowhere and now was everywhere. “I’ve been working for a long time, it’s just nobody knew,” she said.
With long red-blond curls, no makeup, and jeans and sneakers, Ms. Tempest is by turns shy and vulnerable, forceful and direct. She had recently been named a member of the chic club, she explained; she thanked the waiter for bringing her coffee, and meant it.
And while she has put her heart and soul into her work, she is sometimes reluctant to reveal details about her life.
Over the past decade, Ms. Tempest has worked her way from open-mike nights at clubs not far from the Electric to the important Latitude Festival in Suffolk, England (where, she said, she played for a handful of people “passed out in a tea tent”), to London’s Royal Court Theater, where she performed “Brand New Ancients.”
But she can barely contain her excitement about her first studio-produced album. “I was just so thrilled that I got a record deal,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it was on Spotify and that people were listening to it. Because I’ve been trying to smash my way into the music industry for the best part of 12 years.”
“Everybody Down,” a dozen interconnected songs written and performed by Ms. Tempest and produced by Dan Carey, who has also worked with Bat for Lashes and Franz Ferdinand, paints a vivid picture of difficult lives. It tells the story of Becky, a Londoner trying to put herself through university who falls in with drug dealers and other tough sorts; Ms. Tempest is now transforming the album’s narrative into a novel, due out next year.
The album comes after her 2013 play, “Wasted,” about three Londoners slipping into and pulling themselves out of drugs and despair. Her latest play, “Hopelessly Devoted,” which she just finished, is about a women’s prison.
“There is beauty and dignity in rough lives; there’s beauty and dignity in every life,” Ms. Tempest said. “My childhood and where I grew up and the things that I saw and the people I loved, I experienced all that with open eyes and open senses,” she continued. “And then as I grew older, I fell in love, and it taught me to look for more in people. You know how love can do that to you.”
She was born Kate Calvert and raised in southeast London, the youngest of five children. Her father was a laborer who put himself through law school and is now a lawyer; her mother worked as a teacher. A troubled teenager by her own admission, she left school for a while, started rapping at age 16 and came up through the ranks of London’s thriving spoken-word scene.
She took on the name Tempest because of how she felt when she got onstage. “There was this unstoppable fever that would completely consume me, which was about needing to be heard,” she said. “It was before London was under the thumb of property developers, so there was a lot of space for us to play.”
She later finished high school, studied a bit at the Brit School (a performing arts academy where Adele and Amy Winehouse also took classes) and eventually got a literature degree from Goldsmiths College in London. She says her influences include James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg as well as rappers like Lauryn Hill, the Notorious B.I.G. and the Wu-Tang Clan.
As a white woman who raps, she knows she’s an anomaly, and her audience has little crossover with the hip-hop and grime scenes. “On paper, you describe me, it makes no sense,” she said.
“That’s good,” she added.
“I’m nervous about over-intellectualizing hip-hop,” Ms. Tempest continued. “I don’t want people to think that I fancy myself as a sort of intelligent rapper.” But her themes — “the pressure that ordinary women have been put under by the economic and social situation in Britain,” as Mr. Bragg described it — resonate.
And her fans believe the appeal will carry across the Atlantic. “Her vision is about finding the universal in the local, the mythic in every individual — how we’re all part of something bigger and older than ourselves,” Rachel Mannheimer, who acquired the new poetry collection for Bloomsbury, explained by email.
In the book, Ms. Tempest digs deep, with raw and autobiographical love poems about being bullied at school and about coming-of-age with female lovers. “I was a weird gay woman in a homophobic, misogynistic culture,” she said. “It took me a long time to be able — rather than just trying to hide all those parts of myself — to realize that actually it’s O.K.”
Yet as in “Brand New Ancients,” she uses myth to frame contemporary personal stories. The book is built around poems involving Tiresias, the blind seer from Euripides’s plays, who has been both man and woman.
“I don’t understand why we put this bracket around what we deem to be high culture,” Ms. Tempest said with heat in her voice. “It’s about oppression. Some people feel entitled to access great works of art, and others feel unentitled.”
In the poem called “India,” she tells of a night when she was drunk on vermouth and two women were vying for her affection. “At some point/I asked you to carve your name into the flesh of my arm/With the blade of a Stanley knife,” the poem reads.
Sitting in Soho House, Ms. Tempest pulled up the right sleeve of her sweater to reveal the word “India,” in faint gray block letters, tattooed on her right forearm. The relationship has ended, she said, but the mark remains.
Back in Brixton that night, as Mr. Carey sweated over a Swarmatron synthesizer, which diffuses one note into eight, Ms. Tempest interspersed poems from “Hold Your Own” with songs from “Everybody Down.” The audience danced, and hung on her every word.
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