Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (15 April 1958 – 7 December 2023) was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing.

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Springer was born on 15 April 1958, in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, England, where he was also raised.

He referred to this area as the "Jamaican capital of Europe".

He was the son of Oswald Springer, a Barbadian postman, and Leneve (née Wright), a Jamaican nurse, and had a total of seven younger siblings, including his twin sister, Velda.

Tired of the limitations of being a black poet communicating with black people only, he decided to expand his audience, and in 1979, at the age of 22, he headed to London, where his first book would be published the next year.

Having moved to London, Zephaniah became actively involved in a workers' co-operative in Stratford, which led to the publication of his first book of poetry, Pen Rhythm (Page One Books, 1980).

He had earlier been turned down by other publishers who did not believe there would be an audience for his work, and "they didn't understand it because it was supposed to be performed".

Three editions of Pen Rhythm were published.

Zephaniah said that his mission was to fight the dead image of poetry in academia, and to "take [it] everywhere" to people who do not read books, so he turned poetry readings into concert-like performances, sometimes with The Benjamin Zephaniah Band.

While living in London, Zephaniah was assaulted during the 1981 Brixton riots and chronicled his experiences on his 1982 album Rasta.

He experienced racism on a regular basis:

"They happened around me. Back then, racism was very in your face. There was the National Front against black and foreign people and the police were also very racist. I got stopped four times after I bought a BMW when I became successful with poetry. I kept getting stopped by the police so I sold it."

In 1982, he released an album, Rasta, which featured the Wailers performing for the first time since the death of Bob Marley, acting as a tribute to Nelson Mandela.

In a session with John Peel on 1 February 1983 – one of two Peel sessions he recorded that year – Zephaniah's responses were recorded in such poems as "Dis Policeman", "The Boat", "Riot in Progress" and "Uprising Downtown".

His second collection of poetry, The Dread Affair: Collected Poems (1985), contained a number of poems attacking the British legal system.

Rasta Time in Palestine (1990), an account of a visit to the Palestinian occupied territories, contained poetry and travelogue.

Talking Turkeys (1994), his first poetry book for children, was reprinted after six weeks.

It topped the charts in Yugoslavia, and due to its success Mandela invited Zephaniah to host the president's Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 1996.

He won the BBC Radio 4 Young Playwrights Festival Award in 1998 and was the recipient of at least sixteen honorary doctorates.

A ward at Ealing Hospital was also named in his honour.

In 1999, he wrote his first novel Face – a story of "facial discrimination", as he described it – which was intended for teenagers, and sold some 66,000 copies.

Poet Raymond Antrobus, who was given the novel when he had just started attending a deaf school, has written: "I remember reading the whole thing in one go. I was very self-conscious about wearing hearing aids and I needed stories that humanised disability, as Face did. I was still struggling with my literacy at the time, and I understood Benjamin as someone who was self-taught and had been marginalised within the education system. And so he really felt like an ambassador for young people like me."

Zephaniah was poet-in-residence at the chambers of Michael Mansfield QC, and sat in on the inquiry into Bloody Sunday and other cases, these experiences led to his Too Black, Too Strong poetry collection (2001).

Zephaniah's second novel Refugee Boy, about a 14-year-old refugee from Ethiopia and Eritrea, was published in August 2001.

His second novel, Refugee Boy, was the recipient of the 2002 Portsmouth Book Award in the Longer Novel category.

We Are Britain! (2002) is a collection of poems celebrating cultural diversity in Britain.

He published several collections of poems, as well as novels, specifically for young people.

It was the recipient of the 2002 Portsmouth Book Award in the Longer Novel category, and went on to sell 88,000 copies.

In 2003, he was offered appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) but publicly rejected the honour, stating that: "I get angry when I hear that word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers, brutalised".

Zephaniah wrote that he was strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and what he called "street politics", and he said in a 2005 interview: "Well, for most of the early part of my life I thought poetry was an oral thing. We used to listen to tapes from Jamaica of Louise Bennett, who we think of as the queen of all dub poets. For me, it was two things: it was words wanting to say something and words creating rhythm. Written poetry was a very strange thing that white people did."

His first performance was in church when he was 11 years old, resulting in him adopting the name Zephaniah (after the biblical prophet), and by the age of 15, his poetry was already known among Handsworth's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities.

He was educated at Broadway School, Birmingham, from which he was expelled aged 13, unable to read or write due to dyslexia.

He was sent to Boreatton Park approved school in Baschurch, Shropshire.

The gift, during his childhood, of an old, manual typewriter inspired him to become a writer.

It is now in the collection of Birmingham Museums Trust.

As a youth, he spent time in borstal and in his late teens received a criminal record and served a prison sentence for burglary.

He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008.

In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.

As an actor, he had a major role in the BBC's Peaky Blinders between 2013 and 2022.

A vegan and animal rights activist, who self-identified as an anarchist, Zephaniah supported changing the British electoral system from first-past-the-post to alternative vote.