Benjamin Zephaniah, Malachi McIntosh

On 24 June 2021, Benjamin Zephaniah was in conversation with the writer and editor Malachi McIntosh at the Story Museum in Oxford. In the conversation, Zephaniah looks back on watershed moments in his life, and speaks candidly and fiercely about the power of poetry to impact minds and politics. 

Benjamin Zephaniah is one of Britain’s most eminent contemporary poets, best known for his compelling spoken-word and recorded performances. An award-winning playwright, novelist, children’s author, and musician, he is also a committed political activist and outspoken campaigner for human and animal rights. He appears regularly on radio and TV, literary festivals, and has also taken part in plays and films. He continues to record and perform with his reggae band, recently releasing the album Revolutionary Minds. His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.

Malachi McIntosh is editor and publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). His fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature.

Q&A Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director.

The event was organised in association with the Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds project and The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and formed part of the webinar series Art & Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture.

Cite this: “Art & Action: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-art-action-benjamin-zephaniah-in-conversation. Accessed 11 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Benjamin Zephaniah, Waterstones, Piccadilly, London, 6 December 2018, Edwardx (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Christian Habekost describes dub poetry – Zephaniah’s chief genre – as an ‘artful fusion’ of ‘oral and text media, singing and talking, music and literature’, with patterned ‘riddim’ its ‘central formative aspect.’ Zephaniah’s first EP, Dub Ranting (1982), reflects this fusion, integrating the ‘ranting’ of predominantly white British punk performers with black Caribbean-influenced dub music, which itself merges reggae and spoken word. Pen Rhythm (1979), his first collection of poetry, was published by the London left-wing cooperative bookstore, activist space and vegetarian food shop Whole Thing. While describing himself as ‘a mixture of England and Jamaica, but mostly England,’ Zephaniah is often critical of English society, situating his work in opposition to racial and ethnic discrimination. Heavily involved in the Brixton Riots of the mid-1980s, his poetry collections including the Dread Affair (1986), City Psalms (1992), and Too Black, Too Strong (2001) are prominently concerned with black identity and activism. He has written several poems in remembrance of those killed as a consequence of racism and xenophobia, including Joy Gardner, Stephen Lawrence and Steve Biko.

Zephaniah’s poetry is centrally and sometimes searingly concerned with personal struggles, including his own divorce and infertility. His fourth collection, Propa Propaganda (1996), ends with the chilling lines:

There must be a baby
In there
Somewhere,
There must be
A baby
In here.

His most celebrated work for children, Talking Turkeys, brings together short rhyming poems that humorously muse on the plight of fearful animals and mistreated children. Bob Mole describes the wit in Zephaniah’s work as a ‘strong flail’ which ‘even if it doesn’t bring change, makes the laugher feel better for a while’. Marketed at teenagers, Zephaniah’s novels are modelled on young outcasts and immigrants. The satirical film Dread Poets Society (1992) – starring Alan Cumming, Emma Fielding and Timothy Spall alongside Zephaniah – is a self-conscious reflection on Zephaniah’s place in the academy. He has also appeared in multiple radio programmes and television documentaries. In the 1920s period drama Peaky Blinders he plays Jeremiah Jesus, an ex-military preacher and gangster.

Zephaniah continues to travel widely for performances (once performing on five continents in twenty days), and has maintained a sustained interest in global politics. City Psalms alone contains reference to political struggles in Australia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Kurdistan, Mali, Palestine, the United States and the imagined communities of ‘Utopia’ and ‘McDonalds’. As a frequent and willing collaborator, one of his most genre-bending productions, Naked (2005), contains authorised prints of Banksy artworks in the poetic liner-notes accompanying a musical record. Zephaniah’s later writing has turned to teaching and reflecting on his own life and work. He dedicates his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah, to himself:

And why not?
There was a time I thought I wouldn’t live to thirty.
I doubled that and now I’m sixty.
Well done, Rastaman, you’re a survivor.
A black survivor.

—Robert Freeman, 2020

Cite this: Freeman, Robert. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 11 February 2026.

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