benjamin zephaniah

Art & Action: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation

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 31 January 2022.