Results for 'benjamin zephaniah'

1. Eden McKenzie-Goddard

Smallie

Tender, lyrical and strikingly assured, Smallie moves with a propulsive energy, structured around cliffhangers and withheld revelations. In its mosaic of Caribbean immigrant life in London, it echoes the emotional reach of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, but reframed with the hindsight of just how fragile belonging is, and how easily it can be withdrawn. It feels like a novel that will come to sit among the defining literary accounts of this shameful period of British history

1. Linton Kwesi Johnson

Selected Poems

Linton's rhymes speak for our time

Part of a Story That Started Before Me

I challenge anybody to read this anthology without being inspired to learn more! Highly recommended, this is an anthology to contemplate, revisit and relish

1. Nikki May

Wahala

Refreshing and original. Portrays a London steeped in the colours and sounds of Lagos

1. Bernardine Evaristo

Blonde Roots

Presents an imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people. This title brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises questions about the society.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958, Birmingham, England)is a British Jamaican Rastafarian writer and dub poet. He is a well-known figure in contemporary English literature, and was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. Zephaniah was born and raised in Handsworth district of Birmingham, which he called the "Jamaican capital of Europe"- He is the son of a Barbados postman and a Jamaican nurse. A dyslexic, he attended an approved school but left aged 13 unable to read or write. He writes that his poetry is strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and what he calls "street politics". His first performance was in church when he was ten, and by the age of fifteen, his poetry was already known among Handsworth's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities.He received a criminal record with the police as a young man and served a prison sentence for burglary.Tired of the limitations of being a black poet communicating with black people only, he decided to expand his audience, and headed to London at the age of twenty-two.