- He declined an O.B.E. (Order of the Order of the British Empire) for his services to literature in the 2003 Queen's Honours List.
- He gave up smoking cannabis in his thirties.
- During his childhood he was given an old, manual typewriter which he says inspired him to become a writer. It is now in the collection of Birmingham Museums Trust.
- Zephaniah won the BBC Young Playwright's Award.
- His first performance was in church when he was 11 years old, and by the age of 15, his poetry was already known among Handsworth's Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities.
- As a young man, Zephaniah received a criminal record and served a prison sentence for burglary.
- The elders of his mother's church, feeling he had a prophet-like quality with language, dubbed him Zephaniah ("treasured by God"), and he used this as his stage name.
- Zephaniah's family were Christian but he became a Rastafari at a young age.
- Despite becoming famous as a writer and poet, he was dyslexic and he left school at the age of 13 unable to read or write.
- In 2016, Zephaniah wrote the foreword to Angry White People: Coming face-to-face with the British far right by Hsiao-Hung Pai.
- Zephaniah's first book of poetry for children, called Talking Turkeys (1994), was reprinted after six weeks. In 1999, he wrote his first novel Face, which was intended for teenagers.
- He was listed at 48 in The Times list of 50 greatest postwar writers.
- He was a supporter of Aston Villa F.C. and was the patron for an Aston Villa supporters' website.
- In 1982, Zephaniah released the album Rasta, which featured the Wailers' first recording since the death of Bob Marley as well as a tribute to the political prisoner (later to become South African president) Nelson Mandela. The album gained him international prestige and topped the Yugoslavian pop charts. It was because of this recording that he was introduced to Mandela, and in 1996, Mandela requested that Zephaniah host the president's Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
- Zephaniah wrote that his poetry was strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and what he called "street politics".
- He was awarded Best Original Song in the Hancocks 2008, Talkawhile Awards for Folk Music (as voted by members of Talkawhile.co.uk) for Tam Lyn Retold recorded with The Imagined Village. He collected the award at The Cambridge Folk Festival on 2 August 2008, describing himself as a "Rasta Folkie".
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