HECTIC doesn’t quite cut it. Chaotic falls short. Speech Debelle’s world has changed beyond recognition since she won the Mercury music prize last week.

“I’ve gone for days without eating, I’ve hardly slept and it’s been the best week of my life,” says the 26-year-old London rapper, dissolving into a burst of laughter. “I still can’t believe it.”

As we speak, she’s rushing from the hairdresser to the recording studio.

“I hardly ever get my hair done, but they said I’m going to meet the Prime Minister,” she explains.

“I haven’t got a clue what to wear. They’ve invited me to some kind of reception at 10 Downing Street. Weird.”

And the studio?

“I’m so excited – I’m off to meet Eg White,” she explains. “He’s the man who wrote Leave Right Now for Will Young and Chasing Pavements for Adele. In my Mercury speech, I said how much I wanted to work with him.

“Mercury is an opportunity for me to make a wish list for my career. It won’t all come true, but it’s a way of getting what you want out there, and then seeing what comes back.”

There’s a reason that Speech Debelle’s debut album is called Speech Therapy, and that’s because she speaks straight from the heart, with complete intimacy, as if only addressing one person, as if she expects the record never to be heard.

She left home when she was 19, after a falling-out with her mother, and lived in homeless hostels for four years.

“It's overstating it to say I was homeless – I stayed at friends' houses as well as hostels, and kept in touch with my mum,” she says.

Since its release, slow burn has turned into forest fire, with a storm of critical acclaim culminating in her nomination for the internationally renowned Mercury Music Prize – beating albums from The Horrors, Florence and the Machine, Kasabian and Friendly Fires.