British writer Alex Wheatle, the author of books including East of Acre Lane and the Crongton series, has died aged 62.
“It is with great sadness to inform you that Alex Wheatle, our ‘Brixton Bard’, sadly passed away on Sunday 16 March 2025 after his fight with prostate cancer”, his family wrote in a statement on the author’s Instagram page.
“For so many writers like me, Alex Wheatle was a lodestar,” said the critic Colin Grant. “His writing was sharp, clear-eyed and generous.”
Wheatle traced his interest in writing to his time in prison. After being arrested during the Brixton uprising of April 1981, Wheatle spent four months in prison, where he read CLR James, Charles Dickens, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and John Steinbeck among other authors handed to him by his cellmate.
“Whatever I achieve in this old writing game is down to the conversion I experienced under Simeon in Wormwood Scrubs,” he wrote in the Guardian in 2021.
Wheatle was born in Brixton, south London, on 3 January, 1963, to Jamaican parents, and spent much of his childhood in Shirley Oaks children’s home in Croydon. The fourth film of Steve McQueen’s 2020 BBC anthology series Small Axe, titled Alex Wheatle, is based on the author’s childhood and imprisonment.
Wheatle’s first novel, Brixton Rock, was published in 1999, and is about a 16-year-old who has lived in a children’s home all his life. He wrote many novels for adults over the ensuing decade, including East of Acre Lane, Island Songs and The Dirty South.
His first young adult novel, Liccle Bit, was longlisted for the Carnegie medal in 2016. A follow-up, Crongton Knights, won the 50th Guardian children’s fiction prize the same year. Wheatle told the Guardian that he turned to writing YA novels because he was disillusioned with adult publishing. “Even though I had a good reputation, I always felt a resistance. I didn’t feel like I was making inroads. I felt like I was this token black writer who writes about ghetto stuff.”
Two further Crongton books, Straight Outta Crongton and In the Ends, were published in 2017 and 2023 respectively. A BBC adaptation of the Crongton books is due to land on iPlayer next week.
Wheatle was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2008. His recent books include Home Boys, Home Girl, Cane Warriors and Kemosha of the Caribbean. In 2023, he published a memoir, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head.
Wheatle’s “poignant memoir gives us insights into his own suffering: his early life in care, the bullying and abuse he endured, the brutality of the police,” wrote Lucy Popescu in a Guardian review. “Yet Sufferah also documents his love of reggae, the joy of discovering his paternal family and his journey to become an award-winning writer.”
The author “has 26 years of legacy for you all to continue and enjoy by reading his novels, watch again the self-titled episode ‘Alex Wheatle’ from the Small Axe TV series and also watch the new upcoming Crongton TV series as he looks over us in spirit”, said his family.
“Alex’s fierce intelligence was leavened by a great sense of humour and warm smile which enveloped all who were lucky enough to find themselves in his orbit,” said Grant.
