His mother separated from his father Arthur Benson, and he was raised by a family of Christian fundamentalists for the first ten years of his life, thinking they were his parents.
Then his mother Eileen married the Romanian-born émigré composer Francis Chagrin and he went to live with them.
[1] Benson had worked as an intelligence decoder in Britain and as an actor, but his vocation was poetry.
Originally from London, Benson settled in Bradford in 1989 with his writer/artist wife, Cathy Russell; the couple lived in Manningham.
[3] He was named poet laureate of the City of Bradford (2008) and was also active with Poems on the Underground.