Sydney singer, slam poet & activist Candy Royalle passes

News has emerged that Sydney-based singer, slam poet and activist Candy Royalle has passed away after a four year battle with ovarian cancer.

She was 37.

Her family posted, “She passed… in peace, after years of struggling with her illness.

“For those of you lucky enough to know Candy or see her perform, you would know that her strength, power, conviction and all-encompassing love was beyond anything that can be described, so we will not try now.”

The queer Lebanese-Palestinian Australian worked effectively in a number of mediums to get her hard-hitting passionate message across – receiving acclaim for all of them for her eloquence.

Her band The Freed Radicals were a genre-bending improvisational outfit which allowed Royalle to stay out front to convey her mix of lyrics and multi-award winning poetry and agit politics.

They played throughout Europe and the United States as well as festivals as Woodford Folk, the National Folk, Cygnet Folk and the Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals.

She also collaborated with hip hop artists, cabaret performers, filmmakers and visual artists.

Messages of farewell on social media also noted how hard she worked at lifting the profile of female artists of colour and highlighted the problems for women and First Nation Australians.

US spoken word recording artist Ursula Rucker said of her, “Candy Royalle is all at once fragile, powerful, raw, sensitive, beautiful, unflinching and honest.

“She, her spirit and her work, will change you.”

Candy Royalle did her final performance on June 4.

At the end she looked at the crowd and declared, “I have finally arrived at where I needed to be.”