George the Poet: Finding Room for a Longer Conversation

George the Poet has made a career out of finding room for a longer conversation. In a poem, a podcast or a book, a memory of growing up in north-west London can lead him towards education, the music business or the history of empire. The movement between those subjects is central to his work. He wants to understand how the place a person calls home connects with decisions made far beyond it.

His name is George Mpanga. Readers may know him through Track Record: Me, Music, and the War on Blackness, published in 2024, or through the audio series Have You Heard George’s Podcast?. Across those different forms, he returns to a demanding question: what can an artist do with an audience once they have its attention? His answers have changed as his career has developed. [1][2]

Growing up on St Raphael’s

Mpanga was born to Ugandan parents and grew up on the St Raphael’s estate in Neasden. He began performing rap and grime as a teenager. He attended Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet, then studied politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge, between 2010 and 2013. These were different settings, each with its own expectations about language, achievement and who belonged. [3]

The familiar success story would make Cambridge the destination. Mpanga’s own account is more interested in the journey back towards his community. In an interview reproduced by his former school, he explained that his ambitions had shifted from getting away from the difficulties around him to helping change them. His parents’ belief in education was an important part of that account. [4]

While he was still an undergraduate, he performed at London venues and developed an audience online. The school’s account also records an early prize that supported his plans for youth poetry workshops. The connection between writing and education was therefore present well before his best-known books. Poetry offered a way to practise speaking, making an argument and being heard by other people. [4]

That background helps explain the particular place education occupies in his work. Academic study gave him concepts with which to examine society; music offered forms through which those ideas could travel. A university seminar and a performance demand different kinds of attention. Working between them means thinking about what an audience already knows, what needs explaining and what a line of verse can leave unsaid.

Finding a form of his own

Mpanga later left his record deal, questioning whether the industry suited his ambitions. [5]

Rap remained part of his language. Rhyme can make a sentence memorable; rhythm can hold an argument together; a change of pace can alter the weight of a thought. Describing his work simply as a move from rap to poetry risks missing the skills that carry across both. The published poems and the audio work invite readers and listeners to pay attention to how the words are made.

His first collection, Introducing George the Poet: Search Party, appeared in 2015. Its subjects range from family and education to the city and public policy. Penguin’s account identifies poems including “Go Home”, “Full-time” and “School Blues”, showing the breadth of his early concerns. Personal experience and social argument were already sharing space on the page. [6]

The collection also offers a useful starting point for anyone who finds the larger public label of “political poet” rather abstract. Politics in a writer’s work may involve a government decision, but it can also enter through a classroom, a relationship or a description of a neighbourhood. A poem has room for the consequences of an idea: who must live with it, who gets to explain it and whose experience is heard.

His public responsibilities expanded alongside the writing. In March 2018, his election to the national council of Arts Council England was announced. That brought him into an organisation concerned with the wider conditions in which art is made and shared. For an artist whose early ambitions included poetry workshops, it represents another part of the same field of work: the relationship between an individual creative career and the opportunities available to others. [3]

A podcast built to be listened to

In 2018, Mpanga began Have You Heard George’s Podcast? with his principal collaborator, the producer and composer Benbrick, whose name is Paul Carter. The collaboration is essential to the project’s identity. Mpanga writes and performs, while music and sound design help create the world in which the words are heard. The Peabody Awards credits name both men as creators and producers. [2][7]

The series combines autobiography, imagined scenes and social commentary. It can move between an intimate experience and a wider historical argument within the same episode. Its Peabody citation recognises that range, including its engagement with European colonialism and connections across African, Caribbean, American and British Black life. The awards organisation lists it as a 2019 winner. [7]

Audio gives a writer particular tools. The listener hears hesitation, emphasis and repetition; a musical phrase can establish a mood before the next sentence arrives. These are choices about meaning as well as atmosphere. In work concerned with whose experiences count, the way a voice occupies time can carry as much significance as the information it conveys.

There is also a useful discipline for the audience. A personal recollection, a fictional scene and a historical claim ask for different kinds of reading. Enjoying the movement between them need not mean treating them as interchangeable. That is part of what makes a creative work worth discussing: readers can follow the imagination while still asking how an argument is supported.

Have You Read George’s Podcast?, published in 2022, brings scripts from the first three chapters of the series into print, alongside additional writing and commentary. The book gives readers another way into a project first encountered through headphones. A passage can be revisited, its structure examined and its questions pursued at the reader’s own pace. [8]

The questions behind Track Record

Track Record draws on Mpanga’s upbringing, education and artistic career while exploring the economic and historical forces around them. Its publisher describes a book concerned with colonialism and with music’s capacity to influence social and economic life. The memoir supplies a personal route into those larger subjects. [1]

One useful question to take into the book is how an individual career relates to the circumstances of other people from the same community. An award, a degree or a successful recording can change one person’s prospects. Understanding what happens to everybody else requires attention to institutions, resources and political choices. That distinction gives the reader something more substantial to consider than the familiar list of obstacles overcome.

Another concerns the value of music. A song can earn money, build a reputation, record a local experience or bring people together. Those kinds of value do not necessarily reach the same people. Thinking about who makes a work, who controls its circulation and who benefits from its success opens a different conversation about creative achievement.

Mpanga has pursued these questions through academic research as well. Salzburg Global’s profile, updated in January 2026, describes his doctoral work at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and its focus on social and economic relationships in Black music. It extends his interest in what music can make possible beyond a successful performance: the relationships it builds and the resources it might put into a community. [2]

His books bring a recognisable political perspective, which readers can examine and question. A thoughtful discussion need not require agreement with every conclusion. It can ask where personal testimony is especially illuminating, which historical connections are persuasive and what further evidence would help. Taking a writer seriously includes giving their argument that degree of attention.

Making space for other voices

Mpanga’s contribution to Black British writing also includes editorial work. He curated Part of a Story That Started Before Me: Poems about Black British History, first published in 2023. The anthology brings together writers from different generations, including Benjamin Zephaniah, Grace Nichols, John Agard, Joseph Coelho and Raymond Antrobus. Historian Christienna Fryar supplies historical notes. [9]

An anthology changes the relationship between the person whose name appears on the cover and the voices inside. Here, Mpanga is choosing and introducing work by others. The reader encounters a conversation across time and different kinds of experience. Poetry can provide an imaginative entry into a historical subject, while the accompanying notes offer a way to place it more precisely.

The title suggests a useful way to approach Black British history. An individual arrives within a story already being made by earlier generations. That perspective leaves room for inheritance and disagreement: writers can learn from those who came before them without repeating their language or reaching identical conclusions. For teachers and reading groups, comparing two poems about different periods could begin a discussion about how both history and poetic form shape a voice.

George the Poet is also a patron of Poetic Unity, a Black-led charity founded by Ryan J. Matthews-Robinson. The organisation uses poetry in work with children and young people, with programmes spanning education, mental health, employment and social action. Its emphasis on opportunities to speak and create connects with the educational interests visible in Mpanga’s early career. [10]

Such work directs attention beyond the celebrated performer. A young person needs somewhere to try a line aloud, someone prepared to listen and a chance to revise what they have made. Those ordinary conditions can be easy to overlook when a public discussion concentrates on exceptional talent. They are also a practical way to think about what supporting creativity involves.

Where to begin reading

For readers interested in the relationship between a life story, music and political thought, Track Record is a useful place to begin. You can find it in the Black History bookshop. The earlier Search Party offers a route through individual poems, while Have You Read George’s Podcast? allows the written scripts to be considered alongside the audio series.

Readers exploring his literary context can also turn to our features on Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Each has a distinct voice and history. Reading across them opens questions about performance, language and the ways Black British writers have addressed a public beyond the printed page.

Mpanga’s work is especially rewarding when the audience allows its questions to remain open for a while. A listener might arrive for the rhythm and leave thinking about education; a reader might open a memoir and begin asking about the ownership of culture. The conversation can continue in another book, in a classroom or between people who have heard the same episode differently.

Sources and further reading

1. Hachette: Track Record, publication details and overview.
2. Salzburg Global: George Mpanga, profile updated January 2026.
3. GOV.UK: George Mpanga, biographical account.
4. Queen Elizabeth’s School: George the Poet, education and early career.
5. Guardian interview, April 2024.
6. Penguin: Introducing George the Poet: Search Party.
7. Peabody Awards: Have You Heard George’s Podcast?, citation and production credits.
8. Hachette: Have You Read George’s Podcast?.
9. Penguin: Part of a Story That Started Before Me, contributors and historical notes.
10. Poetic Unity: team and patron.

Portrait credit: George the Poet, 2019. Photograph © Paul Cochrane, published by Matt Deegan. Cropped portrait by Stemoc, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.