Linton Kwesi Johnson

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August 1952 in Chapelton, a rural town in the parish of Clarendon, and joined his mother in Brixton in 1963. Still a schoolboy at Tulse Hill, he joined the British Black Panthers movement and ran a poetry workshop there. A sociology graduate of Goldsmiths College in 1973, he looked after the library of the Keskidee cultural centre and wrote about reggae in the music press. He founded his record label in 1981, and in 2002 Penguin brought him into its modern classics, the second living poet to appear there.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryDread Beat an' BloodLinton Kwesi Johnson · 1975Literature