Zaru Jonson tickets and 2024 tour dates

Biography

Zaru Jonson is a writer and performer, raised in North Wales and based in Cardiff, who has been developing his yowling blend of cascading poetry and rap since seeing a beetle repeatedly attempt to drown itself in an Italian swimming pool in the Summer of 2007.

Since winning second prize and the audience vote at the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, 2009, he has performed up and down Britain at festivals, exhibitions and poetry nights, and once as far afield as the PEN International Literature Festival, New York City, as part of Literature Wales' 'DT100' celebrations of the centenary of Dylan Thomas' birth.

As himself and under the alias Zhubat, he has supported the likes of Saul Williams, Buddy Wakefield, Dr Syntax, and High Focus Records, and been published in Rhyming Thunder: The Alternative Book of Young Poets (Burning Eye, 2012) and Wales Bird / Aderyn Rhiannon: Dylan Thomas in the American Century (Martin Daws, 2017).

"Machine-gun lyrics and verbal pyrotechnics [which] left us stunned, appreciative, and wondering how he could remember it all." - Kathryn Gray, New Welsh Review

"The avant-garde knife-edge of the future of hip-hop poetry...the verbal astronaut...the next level." - Martin Daws, Farrago Slam Champ '94