Born: April 15th, 1958
Died: December 7th, 2023
Benjamin Zephaniah, an author, professor and poet whose work, infused with strong social messages, helped inspire a generation of British poets to find their voices, died aged 65 shortly after being diagnosed with an illness.
Over a four-decade career, Zephaniah was the author of at least 30 books for adults, as well as for teenagers and children. He often wrote about racism and environmental issues; he was widely considered to be among the first poets to address the climate crisis. His work was also taught in classrooms in England, making him a recognisable name there.
“His poems packed a punch for social justice,” said Judith Palmer, the director of the Poetry Society, a British arts organisation. She described them as gentle and humorous at the same time.
In one such poem, Talking Turkeys, published in 1994, Zephaniah addresses kindness toward animals (he became a vegan at 13) with humour and rhythm: Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas / Cos’ turkeys just wanna hav fun / Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked / An every turkey has a Mum.
He recorded multiple albums of music and poetry, performed in venues of all sizes and, between 2013 and 2022, had a recurring role as the character Jeremiah Jesus in the hit show Peaky Blinders, which was set in his hometown, Birmingham. He was also a professor of creative writing at Brunel University near London.
Zephaniah was born Benjamin Springer in Birmingham, England, to Oswald Springer, a post office worker, and Leneve (née Wright), a nurse, who had emigrated from Barbados and Jamaica respectively. He had dyslexia, and left school when he was 14. At 22, he moved to London, where a small publisher put out his first book, Pen Rhythm, in 1983.
Zephaniah’s work contained elements of Jamaican music and poetry. He was credited with opening the door for future generations of poets of colour to express themselves, Palmer said. “He overturned ideas of who a poet could be,” she said.
Zephaniah was also known for making the “British establishment somewhat uncomfortable,” said Nels Abbey, an author and co-founder of the Black Writers Guild, an organisation that represents professional and emerging British writers of Black African and Black African Caribbean heritage.
In 2003, Zephaniah rejected the Order of the British Empire, which is awarded to people for achievements in various fields, as a form of protest against British imperialism. “Stick it, Mr Blair and Mrs Queen,” he said at the time. “Stop going on about the empire.”
“I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality,” he wrote in an essay in The Guardian in 2003.
Zephaniah was open about the racism he encountered in Britain and was known to point out injustices when he saw them. In 2014, as the patron of the Newham Monitoring Project, a community-based antiracism organisation in London, he created the campaign “Stop and Search on Trial,” which sought government accountability for policing methods. “We want to make sure they are doing the right thing,” he said at the time. “We want to get young people to talk about their experiences when they get stopped, to report things, and we want to make young people aware of their rights.”
He was among the most instantly recognisable poets in Britain. “Any street he walked down,” Palmer said, “there’d be people crossing the road to greet him.”
After his death, Raymond Antrobus, a London-based poet, remembered Zephaniah as “someone who was never silent.” “He spoke up bravely with fierce integrity and clarity,” said Antrobus.
In 1990 he married Amina, a theatre administrator; they divorced in 2001. On a visit to China in 2014 he met Qian Zheng, and they married three years later. She survives him, along with his sisters, Velda (Benjamin’s twin), Joyce and Millie, his brothers Mark, Paul, Tippa and David, and his mother.
A version of this article originally appeared in the New York Times.