Margate’s Tracey Emin has been made a Dame in the King’s Birthday Honours.
The Margate artist is a recipient of the Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire honour.
She is among 130 people from the South East to have received honours in HM The King’s Birthday Honours List 2024, published last night by the Cabinet Office.
Emin burst onto the scene with the Young British Artists of the ’90s with confrontational pieces like her appliquéd tent listing Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, and her Turner Prize–nominated My Bed, reproducing her unmade bed after a four-day bender, with crumpled sheets, spent condoms, empty vodka bottles and a pregnancy test.
In January 2017, she bought her 30,000-square-foot stretch of the Thanet Press building in Margate and created a flat and studios.
In 2020 the artist received a diagnosis of bladder cancer and underwent an operation in the Summer which meant the removal of many of her female reproductive organs. She now also has a stoma bag but is in remission from the cancer.
In 2022 she was made an Honorary Freewoman of Margate in recognition of her international acclaim as an artist and her investment in the cultural and physical environment of Margate.
The following year she opened TKE Studios (Tracey Karima Emin) and her artist residency project in Margate, adding to her growing portfolio of investment in the town which includes the former Margate Constitutional Club and One Union Crescent.
The 60-year-old bought the former Edwardian bathhouse, mortuary and children’s nursery in November 2021 for £750,000. She has spent upwards of £1million renovating and refurbishing the site.
She also owns The Brown Jug pub in Broadstairs.
Recipients from South East make up 13% of the total number of recipients receiving honours this year.
Also named in the awards is Michelle Weltman, of Birchington, who is made Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for voluntary and charitable services to Disability Sport and to the LGBTQI Sporting community in London.
Anyone can nominate someone for an honour. If you know someone who has achieved fantastic things worthy of recognition, you can nominate them at https://www.gov.uk/honours.
