Acclaimed author and poet Benjamin Zephaniah has admitted that he hit a former girlfriend.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Zephaniah, who is one of Britain’s best-known poets, confessed that in the past he had been violent to a partner. “The way I treated some of my girlfriends was terrible. At one point I was violent. I was never like one of these persons who have a girlfriend, who’d constantly beat them, but I could lose my temper sometimes,” he told presenter Nihal Arthanayake. “There was one girlfriend that I had, and I actually hit her a couple of times, and as I got older I really regretted it. It burned my conscience so badly. It really ate at me, you know. And I’m a meditator. It got in the way of my meditation.”

The child of a violent home – he has spoken publicly about how his father beat his mother, and wrote a BBC radio play about it called Listen to Your Parents – Zephaniah said he moved away from violence himself as he became involved in politics, and in protests against South African apartheid in the 80s and early 90s.

“I remember I was on a march and I was saying ‘Freedom! International freedom!’, and I thought, ‘I just left my girlfriend at home and told her not to leave the house – I’m a hypocrite. I’m an oppressor and a hypocrite,’ and at that moment, I just stopped,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Right, I’m going to think for myself, I’m going to stop following the crowd.’ Because that was what all my male friends were doing. We wouldn’t say we had a girlfriend, we would go up to each other and say, ‘Hey man are you controlling a woman?’ ... I just went, ‘No, that is it.’”

Zephaniah was appearing on the show to promote his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah, which is released this week. He said that he had not written about the violence in the memoir, but told Arthanayake that he had apologised to his former girlfriend, and has also donated money to women’s refuges.

According to Zephaniah, his ex was unimpressed by his change of heart. “We stayed in touch for a while and one day I said to her, ‘I’m really sorry for the way I acted in the past. It wasn’t me, I was just following the crowd,’” he said. “She turned around to me and said, ‘I liked you then, I think you’re a wimp now, you’ve been hanging out with too many white feminists and listening to Radio 4.’ It really blew me away. She just laughed at me and said, ‘A man has got to learn how to control his women, Benjamin. You’ve lost it.’”

Zephaniah, who rejected an OBE in 2003, went on to recite lines from a poem he has written about the relationship: “How you talk about life and justice when you can’t handle domestic crisis? Now you’re talking about burning Rome, but you don’t have liberty at home. Now you’re talking about fight the fight, when your sister can’t walk the streets at night. Not because you’re so proud and hip, hey, check out your own relationship.”