Find out what it's like to be a famous poet, author and performer in this autobiography by Benjamin Zephaniah. Learn what it was like growing up in a house of seven children, meeting Nelson Mandela and how he sets about writing poetry, all told through his own voice and accompanied by artwork from Kate Greenaway winning illustrator Victor Ambrus.

* Diamond/Band 17 books offer more complex, underlying themes to give opportunities for children to understand causes and points of view.

* An autobiography

* A timeline on pages 54 and 55 presents the key events in Benjamin Zephaniah's life chronologically, allowing plenty of recapping and further discussion.

* Curriculum Links: Citizenship: Living in a diverse world

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Diamond Series, My Story .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 56 pages in this book. This book was published 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Benjamin Zephaniah Birmingham-born Zephaniah is the author of a number of poetry collections for both adults and children, including Funky Chickens, Too Black, Too Strong and We are Britain. He has also written three novels -- Face, Refugee Boy and Gangsta Rap.