“In the beginning,” recalls Linton Kwesi Johnson, “writing verse was for me a political act and poetry a cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle.” Few contemporary authors have been so forthright, or so capable, in positioning literature within the living “struggle” of emancipation movements, whether proletarian or postcolonial, or, in Johnson’s case, some combination of the two.

As a landmark collection of his essays, Time Come: Selected Prose, is published for the first time this year, and as Johnson himself once again enters the cultural spotlight with appearances at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and in conversation at London’s Southbank Centre, socialists can only gain from revisiting, and reclaiming, the vibrant legacy of this most radical of writers.

Nearly five decades since he first won renown as a dub poet and grassroots activist, Johnson’s verse retains its power as a vital record of the black British experience since the mid-1960s. It is an indictment of the manifold ways in which white supremacy has operated in British life over the same period: from police brutality to deportation, street-level violence, and verbal abuse.