Benjamin Zephaniah was a brilliant poet and an incredible human being. He had dyslexia but he ended up on the national curriculum. He grew up in Birmingham and left school at 14 and got into trouble. Before he came to London he used to sleep with a gun under his pillow but he never wanted to be part of that world. Literature was a way out.
The first time I came across his work I was about 17 years of age, on a housing estate in Atherton, Manchester and someone gave me a pamphlet stapled together called Pen Rhythm. A couple of years later I published my own pamphlet, stapled together, called Perceptions of the Pen. He’s been a guiding light all my life.
