本杰明·泽凡尼

本杰明·泽凡尼（1958年4月15日—2023年12月7日）是英国作家、演员和诗人。本杰明·泽凡尼生于英国伯明翰 。他的父母分别来自巴巴多斯和牙买加。 他曾参演电视剧浴血黑帮。

他也是一名纯素主义者和动物权利运动活动家。2003年，本杰明·泽凡尼被授予大英帝国官佐勋章(OBE)，但他拒绝接受并表示：“当我听到‘帝国’这个词时，我就生气；它让我想起奴隶制，它让我想起数千年的残酷，它让我想起我的祖先被强奸，我的祖先被虐待”。

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (15 April 1958 – 7 December 2023) was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing. Over his lifetime, he was awarded 20 honorary doctorates in recognition of his contributions to literature, education, and the arts. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.

He won the BBC Radio 4 Young Playwrights Festival Award in 1998 and was the recipient of at least sixteen honorary doctorates. A ward at Ealing Hospital was also named in his honour. His second novel, Refugee Boy, was the recipient of the 2002 Portsmouth Book Award in the Longer Novel category. In 1982, he released an album, Rasta, which featured the Wailers performing for the first time since the death of Bob Marley, acting as a tribute to Nelson Mandela. It topped the charts in Yugoslavia, and due to its success Mandela invited Zephaniah to host the president's Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 1996. As an actor, he had a major role in the BBC's Peaky Blinders between 2013 and 2022.

A vegan and animal rights activist, as well as an anarchist, Zephaniah supported changing the British electoral system from first-past-the-post to alternative vote. In 2003, Zephaniah was offered appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). He publicly rejected the honour, stating: "I get angry when I hear that word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers, brutalised."

Early life

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah was born on 15 April 1958, in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, England, where he was also raised. He referred to this area as the "Jamaican capital of Europe". The son of parents who had migrated from the Caribbean – Oswald Springer, a Barbadian postman, and Leneve (née Honeyghan), a Jamaican nurse who came to Britain in 1956 and worked for the National Health Service – he had a total of seven younger siblings, including his twin sister, Velda.

Zephaniah wrote that he was strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and what he called "street politics", and he said in a 2005 interview: Well, for most of the early part of my life I thought poetry was an oral thing. We used to listen to tapes from Jamaica of Louise Bennett, who we think of as the queen of all dub poets. For me, it was two things: it was words wanting to say something and words creating rhythm. Written poetry was a very strange thing that white people did. His first performance was in church when he was 11 years old, resulting in him adopting the name Zephaniah (after the biblical prophet), and by the age of 15, his poetry was already known among Handsworth's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities.

He was educated at Broadway School, Birmingham, from which he was expelled aged 13, unable to read or write due to dyslexia. He was sent to Boreatton Park approved school in Baschurch, Shropshire.

The gift, during his childhood, of an old, manual typewriter inspired him to become a writer. It is now in the collection of Birmingham Museums Trust.

As a youth, he spent time in borstal and in his late teens received a criminal record 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 in 1979, at the age of 22, he headed to London, where his first book would be published the next year.

While living in London, Zephaniah was assaulted during the 1981 Brixton riots and chronicled his experiences on his 1982 album Rasta. He experienced racism on a regular basis: