Music Box revisited: Benjamin Zephaniah reveals how he became an authorSource: The Independent
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00:00 So the thing was I was doing poetry and then a editor at this publishing house
00:08 actually she was in Puffin Books and then she went to Bloomsbury and she
00:13 said would you write a novel and I said like I'm not sure about that and she
00:20 kind of convinced me and I wrote my first novel Face, my second one was
00:23 Refugee Boy and the third one was Gangster Rap. Yeah I've read them all. You probably know them better than me. They're the only books I've ever read from start to finish.
00:33 But the thing was that especially when I did Face, when I started Face because I was so
00:37 well known for kind of political poetry and campaigning and all that stuff
00:41 everybody was expecting a kind of black Brixton novel kind of thing. I thought no I want to show people that I can write.
00:47 I want to kind of base it on a white guy. And the other thing is you see I was
00:54 probably like you when I was at school I didn't like books I was dyslexic but I
00:58 didn't even know the word dyslexic back then right so I hated books I say I hated books I just
01:04 looked at them and I looked at how big they were and I was like that's hard work.
01:08 And so I know how difficult it is so when I start writing books I always
01:14 start by thinking right remember the 13, 14, 15 year old Benjamin. What would you
01:21 have liked to have read? And that's how I start that's why Face starts with
01:25 joy writing.