George the Poet.
“Have You Heard George’s Podcast?,” by the British spoken-word artist George the Poet, moves between memoir, reportage, fiction, and comedy, delivered almost entirely in rhyming verse.Photograph by Andrew Cotterill / Camera Press / Redux

The medium of podcasting has become so essential that it feels like it’s been around forever, while also being novel enough to surprise listeners with new forms and content, such as a deep dive into the cultural significance of Dolly Parton, or The Paris Review’s peregrination through its own archive. It’s still unusual, though, when a podcast blows through the medium’s newly established boundaries, offering an experience as innovative as it is undefinable. “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?,” by George Mpanga, a British spoken-word artist and activist, does just that, as evidenced by the nominations received for its first season at last year’s British Podcast Awards. It was nominated in six disparate categories: Best Current Affairs, Moment of the Year, Best Arts & Culture, Best Fiction, Best New Podcast, and Smartest Podcast, the latter four of which it won, along with a special award as Podcast of the Year. All that was before “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” returned for an acclaimed second season that concluded earlier this year, having been scooped up by the BBC and thereby brought to an even wider audience.

As the podcast judges discovered, categorizing Mpanga’s creation is a mug’s game, as is summing it up with anything other than bemused superlatives. But here’s a short list of some of the subjects that “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” addresses: growing up on a London council estate, or housing project; the interplay between crime and rap music; school segregation; the Grenfell Tower tragedy; the consequence of a lack of generational wealth; the history of black American music; the modern slave trade; contemporary Ugandan politics; the trials of romantic commitment; the experience of writer’s block; the imperative to use one’s talent; the anxieties that come along with being an artist; the wearying ordeal of being subject to racist policing. In one episode, Mpanga samples a video clip shot in the summer of 2018, when he was stopped and searched by police outside his parents’ house after returning from performing a show. “Google me! Wikipedia me!” he tells the cops in the video; if they had, they would have learned that the previous month, he had opened the BBC’s coverage of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with one of his poems.

Formally, the podcast is unpredictable, moving between memoir, reportage, fiction, even comedy. (It’s also hard to dip into: the podcast aspires to a literary form, offering chapters instead of seasons, and is best listened to from beginning to end. Chapter 3 will appear later this year.) At one moment, “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” offers consciousness-raising exhortation; at the next, consciousness-streaming self-examination. With a complexly layered sound design, the podcast is mostly but not exclusively spoken by Mpanga, whose voice is gentle, persuasive, and generous, and whose other stylistic innovation is to render the podcast almost entirely in rhyming verse that, like the rapping to which it is indebted, amounts to a naturalistic but heightened form of everyday speech.

“I did feel very vindicated,” Mpanga said, of his podcast-award sweep, when we met recently in Central London. Mpanga is twenty-nine, grew up in Harlesden, in northwest London, the second of six children whose parents emigrated from Uganda, in the nineteen-eighties. He grew up on a housing estate called St. Raphael’s; he writes with artful offhandedness of the neighborhood’s quotidian violence, drugs, and gang affiliations. The first episode of the first season of “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” begins with Mpanga watching his nephews and their friends playing in the street. “I’m twenty years older than these kids, and I’m imagining what the next twenty years will be like for them,” he says on the podcast. “Some of them will obviously be dead. Some in jail. Some sitting right here watching their own kids, asking the same questions.” The bleak assessment has a pedagogical purpose: Mpanga’s podcast seeks to explain the logic of the streets without glamorization or endorsement. “Nobodyness—that’s a thing that’s chasing a lot of us,” he said. “It’s like you’re nothing—you’re not counted.”

As a child, Mpanga was set on a different path by his own parents, who were discovering that the education system had lower expectations for their children than they did. Mpanga was accepted at eleven into Queen Elizabeth Boys, a selective secondary school in a more affluent area that entailed a three-hour round trip by bus from his home. “My mum obviously wanted me to go to Q.E., but I wasn’t ready for the competition / Blud, I couldn’t even do long addition,” he recounts in a long autobiographical digression, in an episode called “A North West Story.” The BBC Concert Orchestra accompanied Mpanga’s recitation of the piece during a live performance at BBC’s Radio Theatre. School was a difficult experience, he says, but it produced results: At nineteen, he went to Cambridge University to read politics, psychology, and sociology. Sometimes, “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” has the energy of a late-night monologue delivered by an undergraduate drunk on learning, outpacing his professor in facts and finesse. Of his education experience, he told me, “When you examine the nuances of these spaces, and these awkward social challenges, you’ll find individuals with stories about how they navigated their unique situations, using some of the imperfections of their environment.”

Mpanga, who had learned to be an m.c. while still in his mid-teens, started performing under the name George the Poet while at Cambridge. Upon leaving college, he signed with a record label; but, despite being nominated for awards, he parted ways with the company, having decided that the medium was too restrictive for the message he sought to express. In “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” Mpanga considers the perception that grime and drill, London’s subgenres of rap, celebrate violence, and the ways in which the larger industry profits from that relentless focus: “We now provide the fuel for a multibillion-dollar storytelling industry / And all we have to show for it is new versions of the same story,” he says. Mpanga’s love for music is a constant presence in the podcast, including the sixth episode of the first series, when he goes from dissecting London to exploring the Ugandan pop scene, in just one of the podcast’s continent-crossing excursions.

Mpanga’s consideration of his relationship with his parents’ homeland of Uganda, and with his own homeland of Britain, fuels the podcast’s profoundest inquiry. At a moment when it seems that the entire country, having finally Brexited, is engaged in a painful process of figuring out its identity, Mpanga’s journey through his own story offers unexpected resonances for listeners of quite different backgrounds from his own. Mpanga generated headlines when he revealed, in the final episode of the second season, that he had turned down an M.B.E., an honor awarded by the Queen nominating persons of achievement to become Members of the Order of the British Empire. He declined the honor because of the imperial past for which it is named—a past in which, he recounts in the podcast in a devastatingly soft tone, “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down, and took turns.”

In the final episode of the second season, Mpanga imagines conversations between himself and Uganda and Britain, the countries personified as young women with whom he is entangled in complex, difficult, important relationships; it is no spoiler to reveal that the episode includes a moving pronouncement of his love for Britain. “I think a lot of people missed that,” Mpanga told me. “A lot of people came out of the woodwork to tell me I was wrong, that I should ‘go back to Africa.’ ” He went on, “Britain has a fascinating history; some great ideas have sprung from this part of the world—ideas that I use every single day to make the highest contribution I can. So how can I divorce that, the benefits that I have got from this country, from the traumatic history that my people have encountered in relation to Britain? I can’t separate them.

“And, just like in a marriage, or a relationship, or a friendship, you have to educate the other person on the love that you want,” he went on. “As much as you might feel you don’t deserve to have to do this, how are they ever going to be what you need them to be in this relationship, if you don’t give them every opportunity to do that—especially if you know you can’t live without them?” He didn’t imagine that he could ever turn his back on Britain, or permanently move away, he said. “And even if I did—I grew up here. I found myself here. I met my parents here, you know?”