7. Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Zephaniah speaks truth-to-power like nobody else. A Kung Fu stylist, dub musician, Peaky Blinder, renegade activist, vegan force-of-nature, and much-loved ‘people’s poet’, Benjamin has lived many lifetimes.

He tells Ex Libris in that inimitable raw and sonorous manner about how poetry saved his life; of his mother’s Windrush Generation and its Caribbean oral tradition; being dyslexic and finding a path away from prison; slamming the phone down on Nelson Mandela and exchanging notes with Bob Marley; and why there should be a library on every high street.

Zephaniah also speaks touchingly of the great personal debt - both financial and artistic - that he owes his fellow Ex Libris guest, celebrated bookseller Vivian Archer; not to mention her legendary store Newham Bookshop, which Benjamin fondly calls a ‘home-from-home’.

The shop has been a mainstay in the community for 40 years. It is vital to the local area and widely lauded within the UK book trade at-large.

Many other writers have celebrated the place and found it an inspiration. Iain Sinclair, for example, called it ‘a beacon’.

This year’s Booker Prize winner Bernadine Evaristo describes it as: ‘a fantastic community bookshop run by the wonderful Vivian Archer whose knowledge and love of books stand unrivalled. It is now an institution where everyone is welcome and all kinds of literature can be found for all kinds of reader. In today’s declining world of independent bookshops, this one should be cherished. Long may it flourish.’