RISING star Kate Tempest has spoken of her excitement after being announced as Brighton Festival’s next guest director.

At 31, she is the festival’s youngest guest director to date and follows high-profile figures such as Laurie Anderson (2016), Vanessa Redgrave (2012) and Brian Eno (2010) in curating the event, which runs from May 6 to 28 next year.

Tempest has a deep and diverse connection with the arts, having tackled spoken word, rap, theatre, poetry and fiction so far in her career.

Having performed at the festival twice before – in her debut play Wasted in 2012 and then headlining a music event in 2015 – the Londoner told The Argus she was thrilled at the prospect of bringing the arts to a wide audience.

In an exclusive interview, she said: “For me, gathering together to experience artwork is the most important thing that we can do. These things are life-changing events for me and they should be.”

Reiterating the idea of community through the arts, she added that her aim was to “open the doors a little bit and just allow people in”.

She said: “It’s important for me to bring people together again because I think that we have been forced into this unnatural isolation and it’s causing people a lot of pain.”

While Tempest was not at liberty to disclose the specific details of her designs for the festival, she hinted at some ambitious plans.

“I’ve got ridiculous ideas that are probably never going to be achievable but the Brighton Festival team are amazing at doing everything they absolutely can to make me feel like these goals are achievable goals. I feel very cared for in this place.”

Speaking about the festival’s demographic, she said it was especially important “to bring in younger people.”

Tempest, who released her debut novel The Bricks That Built The Houses earlier this year and whose second album Let Them Eat Chaos is out next month, added that she would not be intimidated by the prestige of the guest directors that have gone before her.

She said: “I think that you can either be cowed by following in the footsteps of big celebrated artists or you can be extremely humbled by it and just recognise that this is an opportunity to do something really great.

“I just can’t wait to see what I can get done.”

THE STELLAR RISE OF A GIRL WITH NO A LEVELS

FROM leaving school with no A levels, Kate Tempest has become one of the most discussed figures in the UK cultural scene.

Her debut record Everybody Down, a concept album based around characters navigating modern London, was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2014.

Her first novel, The Bricks That Built The Houses, fleshed out this narrative.

Tempest’s interest in writing about London comes from personal experience; born and raised in Brockley, she attended the Brit school in Croydon before studying English literature at Goldsmiths College.

Of her university experience, Tempest has said: “I was studying poetry but it killed me. I hated the way they were ripping it apart.”

Having started on the open mic circuit at 16, where she fine tuned her unique brand of rap and spoken word, her literary career reached a peak when she was awarded the Ted Hughes prize in 2013 for her self-performed epic poem Brand New Ancients.

Her writing has been lauded for its wide-ranging themes, from personal exclusion to political dysfunction and the effects of capitalism.