Our Patrons

Introducing renowned poet, musician, long-time vegan and friend of the animals Benjamin Zephaniah! We are proud to have his support. Benjamin is an author with an enormous breadth of appeal, equally popular with both adults and children. Most well-known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults and ground-breaking performance poetry for children, Benjamin also has his own rap/reggae band. He is in constant demand internationally to perform his work - there are rumours that he is Nelson Mandela's favourite poet, and he is the only Rastafarian poet to be short-listed for the Chairs of Poetry for both Oxford and Cambridge University.

Benjamin developed a love of animals at an early age, becoming vegetarian at the age of 11 and vegan at 13. "I didn’t even know what the word meant," he says. "I just knew that I didn’t want to eat animals - it was a real gut feeling. At the time I was in a school where I was getting so much racism, I found comfort in animals. A playground can be the loneliest place in the world when all the kids are playing and nobody will talk to you, so when a cat comes along, you play with the cat, you know? And then the cat comes again the next day and brings a couple of his friends, and you form a community. So that’s where my love of animals started, and that was when I went vegetarian. And later on I decided that I just didn’t want anything to do with any animal product."

Read an interview with Benjamin here: Benjamin Zephaniah

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