Ashleigh Nugent, 46, was born in Yorkshire and grew up in Merseyside with a Scottish mother and Jamaican father. His autobiographical debut, Locks, written over eight years and originally self-published, is set in 1993 and narrated by a mixed-race teenager who, bullied at school and harassed by police, leaves St Helens for Jamaica in search of acceptance. The poet Raymond Antrobus has called the novel “twisty, energetic, voice-led… like Virginia Woolf but from the ends”. Nugent, the co-founder of RiseUp, a community interest company engaged in prisoner rehabilitation, spoke from Wirral, his home since 2009.
What led you to write Locks?
I didn’t really read books until I got back into education in my 20s and dragged myself out of a crazy lifestyle [Nugent was arrested several times in his teens]. I felt I had so much catching up to do and for a long time the novel was trial and error; I didn’t see any models for what I was trying to do. I’d done my dissertation on British mixed-race identity in English literature: there was Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, but what was written by mixed-race men? Black stories – thin on the ground anyway – were always about people with two black parents, and they were about London. Who was representing the nuance of being black while not being in a black community or not even being accepted as belonging to one, as happened to me in Jamaica? Those nuances of being mixed-race black are a reality for so many people in this country and yet nobody of that community seemed to get a door open for them to represent those experiences.
Is that why you initially self-published?
I did feel doors were closed and I wasn’t going to open them by writing begging letters. I took the hip-hop approach: make a record in your bedroom, get a mate to spray a bit of graf for the cover, bring people to the gig and make so much noise the industry has to listen. At that point luck comes into it. When I put the book out in 2020 I thought people would be going: “What the hell’s this guy on about? No one cares about race any more.” Suddenly George Floyd happened; within a few months I had an agent for the first time and very quickly we had all kinds of publishers reading it. Picador offered a deal and said, tell him if he says yes by tomorrow we’ll give him nearly double.
Do you see Locks as a period novel?
It is very much about the culture of 1993; I made a Spotify playlist of all the songs it mentions and it’s five hours long. Maybe only a few readers will get the things about the fashion and culture of that time and place – the 051 nightclub in Liverpool, the clothes shop Stolen from Ivor – but I feel that zooming in on these subatomic particles always shows you something universal. As for whether times have changed, it’d be ridiculous to claim they haven’t. My brother and sister had it much worse than I did in terms of having [racist] words said to them by dinner ladies, the lollipop lady, friends’ parents, teachers, for Christ’s sake, and this was the 90s! Things have changed. But the people who lived through it still have the burden of having gone through their formative years being made to feel less-than. We have to be honest about that – otherwise how can we truly move on?
Why did you write a note justifying the book’s use of those words?
Three different editors tried to get me to add that, as well as a glossary of the scouse and patois. I refused for a long time because I trusted that enough people would understand what I’m doing. But the third time I was asked – “just for those who might need easing into it” – I felt willing to try it out because I thought, there is actually another voice here that isn’t the narrator’s: mine, a 40-odd-year-old bloke who does want to say, I have no intention to offend or upset.
Tell us about your work in prisons.
In my mid-20s I was in a band, working in schools, using rap to engage young people in education. From there I started an arts and education company that I ran for seven years. I wanted to take it into prisons and in 2014 the Tories were privatising the probation service. I thought, the doors are gonna open here – they’ll give billions of quid to their mates and then the doors will shut, but there’ll be an opening. We’ve been going nearly eight years now. I used to do a one-man show based on Locks at HMP Whatton in Nottingham in front of 80 prisoners, a lot of whom were of Jamaican descent. I was so scared: “Why the eff have I done this to meself?!” But they got it. Loads of copies of the self-published version went into HMP Bristol and kept getting nicked from the library; I just kept bringing more in.
What have you been reading lately?
Jimi Jagne and Stephen Small’s 1981: Black Liverpool Past and Present, which talks about the race riots in 1919 after [the sailor] Charles Wotten was stoned to death in the Mersey while the police watched. I’ve also been enjoying David Robson’s The Expectation Effect; it starts with placebos but goes on to look at how your mindset affects your everyday experience.
Name a book that inspired you.
A big influence after I went back to college was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which showed me that a book can be more about what’s going on internally than externally. But I was writing from my own perspective. I think what people need to get their heads around is that a teenage boy – smoking weed, taking coke, getting into violence and porn, poisoned by ideology from the media and our history of imperialism – is as multi-layered and mystical as Clarissa Dalloway; it just so happens he’s a little brown-skinned scouser, know what I mean? His internal world goes as deep and wide as anybody else’s.
Locks is published by Picador on 22 June (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
