by Ben Brooks
By August 1939, Nicholas had managed to get 669 children into Britain. A month later, all German borders closed, and most of the families the children had left behind were killed by the Nazis.
Nobody really knew what Nicholas had done until fifty years later. His wife found a book in the attic with all the names of the children in it, and she asked a TV show for help tracking them down. Nicholas was invited on the TV show. He didn’t know why he was there—his wife and the TV people hadn’t told him—and he didn’t know what to expect.
While he was sitting in the audience, the presenter said, “Stand up if you owe your life to Nicholas Winton!”
All of the people sitting around Nicholas stood up.
They were adults now and they had him to thank for that.
KEN YEANG
(BORN 1948)
Ken was four when his father took him to see the house he was building for their family. He would never forget it.
When it came time to choose a college major, Ken’s father pushed him to study medicine and become a doctor. But he had never lost his fascination with buildings, and he persuaded his father to let him study architecture instead.
It was the 1970s. Ken became one of the first people to focus on ecological design, which means architecture that works with the nature. His idea was to create buildings that merged and worked with the natural world instead of demolishing and replacing it.
His buildings harness the wind for ventilation, use the sun for heat and light, catch rain for cooling, and are filled to the brim with lush gardens and overflowing terraces of native plants. By adding these gardens, Ken tries to keep the buildings from looking like random lumps of metal and glass dropped on to the surface of the planet. He wants them to be tied to nature. He wants the buildings to be alive.
Ken’s own house is called the Roof-Roof House, and it incorporates all of these elements. When he first built it, other architects made fun of him.
“Don’t hire Ken,” they’d tell people, pointing at the Roof-Roof House. “He’ll build you something weird, like that.”
These days, people think of the house as being ahead of its time, and they look to it as an example of what to work toward.
A newspaper recently named Ken as one of the fifty people who could save our planet. He still thinks that the most important thing about any new building is that it makes people happy.
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
(BORN 1958)
Benjamin could barely read or write when he was kicked out of school. He was only thirteen. Things had been so hard at home that he found it difficult to care about studying and always ended up in trouble.
What he really cared about was poetry. Not old poems by dead poets, but the living poems and stories that his mother told him about life in Jamaica. Ones like the tales of Anansi, a tricky spider who could disguise himself as a man, who made a deal with the sky-God to own all of the stories in the world.
Benjamin knew what he wanted to do, so he started doing it.
He wrote his own poems and performed them wherever he could: in churches, community centers, and on the street.
Soon, people started listening.
His poetry was for real people and it was about real things, like the pain of racism, the joy of dancing, and whether it’s okay to eat animals. In no time, you could hear it everywhere: dance floors, protests, concerts, and on the TV. His mission was to bring poetry back to life, to remind people of the power it still has. Benjamin traveled the world, reciting his verses over music that was a mixture of everything from hip-hop to rock.
As he went, he inspired young people not just to write, but to rap, to perform, and to speak up for what they believed in.
Benjamin has helped prime ministers, been on worldwide tours, written bestselling books, and can hardly walk down the street in London without people calling out to him.
“Thanks!” they shout.
He waves back.
And it’s all down to poetry.
was born in 1992 and lives in Berlin. He is the author of several books, including Grow Up and Lolito, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2015.
is a British illustrator, artist, and colorist. He has worked for many clients including the Guardian newspaper, Walker Books, “Gogglebox,” 2000AD, Vertigo Comics, Mojo, and the BBC.
