There's no vegan who is the greatest Because all you vegans are great, Just like the peace dove You symbolise love, And there is no death on your pla… - Benjamin Zephaniah

…Sometimes I’ll do these things for a couple of days then suddenly one day the poem comes out, just like that, in a couple of minutes. I might rewrite it later, a kind of fine tuning, or sometimes I’ll tell the audience it’s a new poem and just perform it to see if it works.

…So to me it’s not about black, white, Asian, whatever. To me, it’s about literature for everybody, you know. There’s a lot of literature and it should represent us, basically – male, female, whatever kind of nationality or racial background you come from: that’s the kind of literature I want to see in the world and hopefully I’m making my own little contribution.

When I start, I have a story that tends to have a lesson to be learnt. A lot of the time my novels are called novels for young adults and I think one of the reasons they are popular with young adults is because they read them and understand it…