Speaking on BBC radio the author, who has written in the past about his father beating his mother, said the violence had ‘burned his conscience’
Acclaimed author and poet Benjamin Zephaniah has admitted that he hit a former girlfriend.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Zephaniah, who is one of Britain’s best-known poets, confessed that in the past he had been violent to a partner. “The way I treated some of my girlfriends was terrible. At one point I was violent. I was never like one of these persons who have a girlfriend, who’d constantly beat them, but I could lose my temper sometimes,” he told presenter Nihal Arthanayake. “There was one girlfriend that I had, and I actually hit her a couple of times, and as I got older I really regretted it. It burned my conscience so badly. It really ate at me, you know. And I’m a meditator. It got in the way of my meditation.”
Related: ‘I went off the rails’: how Benjamin Zephaniah went from borstal to poet
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