Benjamin Zephaniah Dis Poetry online launch event
Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) was a writer and performer of extraordinary range: an oral poet, novelist, playwright, children’s writer, reggae artist, actor, television personality and political activist.
Benjamin Zephaniah's poetry for adults has been gathered together in Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics, published by Bloodaxe on Tuesday 15 April 2025 to mark what would have been his 67th birthday. This posthumous retrospective brings together all the poems from his three Bloodaxe collections, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001), as well as some from The Dread Affair (1985), along with previously unpublished work and lyrics from various recordings.
Too Black, Too Strong (2001), all of which is now published in Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics, included poems written while Benjamin was working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case. It addressed the struggles of black Britain more forcefully than all his previous books, and included his powerful poem ‘What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us’.
Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics will be launched at Bloodaxe's online reading and discussion event on 22 April 2025. Fellow poets Pascale Petit and Vidyan Ravinthiran will pay tribute and will read from Dis Poetry as well as from their own new collections. The event will include clips of Benjamin Zephaniah performing and talking taken from Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s film To Do Wid Me which readers can access in full using the QR code printed in the book. Scroll down for full details.
A day-long celebration of art, poetry and music was held on Saturday 12 April 2025 to honour the life and legacy of Benjamin Zephaniah. Benjamin Zephaniah Day: A Festival of Rhythm, Unity and Revolution was held in the recently-named Benjamin Zephaniah Square at Brunel University in Uxbridge, where Benjamin was a Professor of Creative Writing. Scroll down for details and photographs of the inaugural Benjamin Zephaniah Day.
FORTHCOMING TRIBUTE EVENTS
Sunday 27th April 2025, 6.30pm-9pm, Lyra Poetry Festival, Bristol
St. George’s Bristol (Main Hall)
Dis Poetry: A Tribute to Benjamin Zephaniah
This special Bristol tribute to Benjamin Zephaniah will celebrate his extraordinary work and enduring legacy. The event will feature readings of Zephaniah’s iconic poems, including his ‘Poem for St. Pauls’ performed in Bristol in 1983 for the BBC, as well as talks, personal stories and reflections from Benjamin’s friends and family members. Come along and pay tribute to one of the most influential and remarkable poets in living memory, celebrating his immeasurable contributions to poetry, activism, nature, health and social justice.
Featuring poets and writers Casey Bailey, Pauline Melville and Kadija Sesay, and members of Benjamin’s family including his sisters Joyce Springer-Amadedon and Millicent Springer, and his wife Qian Zephaniah, and Charley McDermott from the recently established Zephaniah Forest. Hosted by Professor Shawn Sobers.
Presented in association with The Benjamin Zephaniah Family Legacy Group, and St Pauls Carnival.
Tickets: £8 (£10 solidarity, £5 concessions). Livestream tickets also available. Booking details below.
https://www.lyrafest.com/#e124291
BLOODAXE ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT FOR DIS POETRY
Tuesday 22 April 2025, 7pm BST
Onlne launch reading with Pascale Petit, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah
Bloodaxe's online launch event for new April 2025 titles by Pascale Petit and Vidyan Ravinthiran also included a tribute to the late and much-missed Benjamin Zephaniah. Pascale Petit and Vidyan Ravinthiran read from and discussed their new collections as well as Benjamin Zephaniah’s retrospective Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
The event included clips of Benjamin Zephaniah performing and talking taken from Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s film To Do Wid Me which readers will be able access in full using the QR code printed in the book.
This free Bloodaxe launch event is now on YouTube.
PAST EVENT
Benjamin Zephaniah Day: A Festival of Rhythm, Unity and Revolution
A day-long celebration of art, poetry and music was held on Saturday 12 April 2025 to honour the life and legacy of the late Benjamin Zephaniah — a true icon of the arts and activism. The festival took place on Saturday 12 April 2025 at Brunel University, where Benjamin was a Professor of Creative Writing. This inaugural festival marked what would have been Benjamin's 67th birthday weekend, and was introduced by his wife Qian Zephaniah.
A feature on this inaugural festival ran in The London Evening Standard: 'Music, poetry and joy mark the first Benjamin Zephaniah Day tribute'. Read online here.
More details and photos are in this piece posted on Brunel's website on 13 April 2025 here.
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Bloodaxe's tribute to Benjamin Zephaniah is on our website here.
Some of Benjamin's many interviews are linked to below.
INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH ON BBC RADIO 3
The Verb: Benjamin Zephaniah, BBC Radio 3, Friday 14 October 2022, 10pm - a BBC Radio 4 Pick of the Week choice
An extended interview with Benjamin Zephaniah was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb on 14 October 2022. The programme was recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival at the Birmingham Hippodrome in September. He was in conversation with host Ian McMillan.
Benjamin read his poems ‘Overstanding’ and ‘Dis Poetry’ from City Psalms, and his poem for children ‘Drivosaurus Rex’, which is included in Benjamin Zephaniah: To Do Wid Me. He also read ‘Having a Word’ and talked about his poem ‘Appeal Dismissed’, both from Too Black, Too Strong, the collection which includes the poems written during his residency with Tooks barristers’ chambers in London.
‘The Verb this week is a special extended conversation with the poet, performer, playwright and activist Benjamin Zephaniah. Benjamin's been publishing and performing his work for adults and children since the early 1980s, and recently committed his life, so far, to print in his autobiography The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah. The programme was recorded in front of a live audience at the BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival in Benjamin's home city of Birmingham.’
Opens with ‘Overstanding’. ‘Dis Poetry’ is read at 16:33, ‘Drivosaurus Rex’ at 30:30. ‘Appeal Dismissed’ and Tooks residency discussed at 33:32 and ‘Having a Word’ at 39:00.
Listen here.
GUARDIAN PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
The Guardian, Today in Focus podcast, online Wednesday 15 July 2020
Half-hour Guardian podcast: Benjamin Zephaniah and George the Poet in conversation with Anushka Asthanh.
‘Benjamin Zephaniah and George the Poet are two of Britain’s most successful contemporary poets. They discuss why, despite being born a generation apart, their work is still exposing racial injustice.’
Listen via The Guardian website here.
INTERVIEW IN THE GUARDIAN
The Guardian, Tuesday 7 July 2020
An interview with Benjamin Zephaniah ran in The Guardian of 7 July 2020. Benjamin was talking about his turbulent lockdown, and his involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The interview ends on a hopeful note, with Benjamin saying ‘I do feel a poetry time coming. I feel pregnant with some poetry.’
Read via the Guardian's website here.
INTERVIEW ON RADIO 4'S FRONT ROW
Front Row: Benjamin Zephaniah, BBC Radio 4, Thursday 14 May 2020, 7.15pm
A half-hour special with Benjamin Zephaniah was broadcast on Radio 4’s Front Row on 14 May 2020.
‘As one of Britain’s best known and loved poets, Benjamin Zephaniah's work has long been featured on the school curriculum. Lately he’s also become a familiar face on television, not least in Peaky Blinders, set in his home city of Birmingham, as well as appearing as a regular panelist on BBC Question Time. But his journey to national literary figure and Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Brunel University has been a remarkable one. There was the relentless racism he faced as in childhood in the 1960s; there was violence within his family, and repeatedly from the police. Zephaniah was involved in crime as a young man. But he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a poet. And he found his voice in a fusion of dub style improvisation and West Indian Music, pioneering live performance poetry on television.
Benjamin Zephaniah joins Front Row from his home in rural Lincolnshire for an extended interview with presenter Samira Ahmed which explores his roots as a poet, his thoughts on the Coronavirus crisis and its impact on frontline workers, and to premiere a new poem he's written in praise of the NHS entitled ‘Praise the Saviour’.'
Listen via the Front Row website:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j1k9
PODCAST INTERVIEW
EX LIBRIS podcast, Episode 7: Benjamin Zephaniah, 17 December 2019
Benjamin Zephaniah gave an hour-long interview to Ben Holden for the EX LIBRIS podcast – a series in which the world’s greatest writers are interviewed in their favourite libraries and bookshops. Benjamin Zephaniah chose the Newham Bookshop, his home-from-home when he lived in London. He was interviewed together with the shop’s owner Vivian Archer.
Benjamin spoke about his autobiography The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (Scribner), and about how he came to be a poet – something he’d dreamed of since the age of 8. He read his poems ‘The Death of Joy Gardner’ from Propa Propaganda and an extract from ‘Rong Radio’, which he performs on film in the DVD-book Benjamin Zephaniah: To Do Wid Me.
‘Benjamin Zephaniah speaks truth-to-power like nobody else. A Kung Fu stylist, dub musician, Peaky Blinder, renegade activist, vegan force-of-nature, and much-loved ‘people’s poet’, Benjamin has lived many lifetimes.
He tells Ex Libris in that inimitable raw and sonorous manner about how poetry saved his life; of his mother’s Windrush Generation and its Caribbean oral tradition; being dyslexic and finding a path away from prison; slamming the phone down on Nelson Mandela and exchanging notes with Bob Marley; and why there should be a library on every high street.
Zephaniah also speaks touchingly of the great personal debt - both financial and artistic - that he owes his fellow Ex Libris guest, celebrated bookseller Vivian Archer; not to mention her legendary store Newham Bookshop, which Benjamin fondly calls a ‘home-from-home’.
Click here to listen.
[15 March 2025]
