Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958) is a British writer, dub poet and Rastafarian. Zephaniah was born and raised in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, which he has called the "Jamaican capital of Europe". He is the son of a Barbadian 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 eleven, 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. (read more on wikipedia)

Links To Peel
Benjamin Zephaniah recalled hearing one of Misty in Roots records for the first time on Peel's show:

"'He didn't do any build up, like 'now some reggae!' He just introduced it just like any other record on his show: 'And this is Misty In Roots...' I thought, wow, white people like our music!'."

In Margrave Of The Marshes, Sheila mentioned how Peel interviewed Benjamin Zephaniah for the Offspring radio programme, where he was supposed to talk to him about infertility after Zephaniah wrote a piece about his experience of it, but due to his shyness, Peel did not raise the topic and instead talked to him about martial arts, until he was compelled to talk about it before he left Zephaniah's house.