In 1984, the poet Fred D'Aguiar (born in London to Guyanese parents) won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and in 1994 won the Whitbread First Novel Award for "The Longest Memory". Linton Kwesi Johnson's rhyming and socio-political commentary over dub beats – including such favourites as "Dread Beat An' Blood" and "Inglan Is A Bitch" – made him the unofficial poet laureate of the British African-Caribbean community. Another dub poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, overcame a spell in prison to become a well-known writer and public figure. In 2003 he declined an OBE, stating that it reminded him of "thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised".