Alex Wheatle, ‘the Bard of Brixton', who rose from tough beginnings to become an award-winning novelist

Yahoo

20-03-2025

Alex Wheatle, who has died aged 62, rose to become Britain's pre-eminent black novelist after a difficult and inauspicious upbringing; his early story, which involved unhappy years in care and a spell in prison, was told in 'Alex Wheatle' (2020), one of the five films that made up the director Steve McQueen's BBC television series, Small Axe.
Wheatle's writing was very much a reflection of the post-Windrush black experience in the UK; despite his life's dark start, his work is riven with a subtle humour. His debut novel Brixton Rock (1999), which received the London Arts Board New Writers Award, told the story of a boy growing up in a children's home and struggling to find his feet. 'Wheatle gives us a fascinating snapshot of black English in the early Eighties,' said the Telegraph.
Wheatle's early struggles furnished the plotlines of many of his nearly 20 books, earning him the sobriquet 'Bard of Brixton'; although sometimes disguised, Brixton and its south London environs framed much of his work.
Alex Alphonso Wheatle was born to Jamaican parents in Brixton on January 3 1963. Although his mother, Almira Gunter, née Panceta Da Costa, had had five children in Jamaica, her marriage there was volatile, and in 1961 she travelled to London, securing a job at Woolworths in Brixton.
She met Wheatle's father Alfred, a carpenter – then, when she was six months pregnant with Alex, her husband arrived from Jamaica looking for her. A solution was arrived at: after she had given birth, she would return to Jamaica and Alfred would bring up the child.
But he did so only until the boy was two, then went back to Jamaica. Alex was taken into care and spent most of his childhood at Shirley Oaks children's home in Croydon. Many years later, the home would become infamous for the psychological and physical abuse residents had suffered.
Wheatle, who in later years campaigned to uncover the truth about the home, recalled: 'I would be beaten with everything, almost every day. Fire pokers. Bits of wood. Coal being thrown at me. Wooden hairbrushes. Shoes. The abuse I suffered was purely physical. Others were abused sexually, but I never was.'
At the home Alex was painfully aware that he had no one. Every Sunday family members would pay visits, but his never did. 'I used to hate Sundays,' he recalled. 'Relatives were coming down and I would put on my best clothes. It really, really broke me. I used to get up really early and watch the first parents walking down to our cottage, wondering if mine would walk down behind them. But that was never the case.'
He chronicled his time at Shirley Oaks in his 2023 memoir Sufferah, which tells the story of how reggae became his salvation following a childhood marred by abuse, imprisonment and police brutality.
Wheatle was also partly saved by his love of reading. 'When I was about eight I was given a copy of Treasure Island. I loved it. I had an aptitude for reading from very early. When I read in bed it transported my mind to different places. Tom Sawyer transported me to the USA and I could imagine I was on a raft down the Mississippi.'
Reggae provided further escape routes: in his mid-teens, under the name of Yardman Irie – who would later become a character in his second novel, East of Acre Lane – he helped to establish the Crucial Rocker sound system. 'I wrote lyrics for performances in community halls, youth clubs, house parties and blues dances.'
These first efforts at writing for public consumption coincided with his move from Shirley Oaks to living alone in Brixton. But before his writing could develop, he was arrested during the Brixton riots in 1981 and given a four-month jail sentence.
Fortunately for Wheatle, his cellmate at Wormwood Scrubs was an older Rastafarian who encouraged Wheatle to educate himself, introducing him to such authors as Chester Himes, Richard Wright, CLR James and John Steinbeck.
But it would be nearly 20 years before Brixton Rock was published. During this time Wheatle married, became a father of three and travelled to Jamaica and tracked down his parents.
Two years after Brixton Rock came East of Acre Lane, the story of Biscuit, a young petty criminal who becomes embroiled in ghetto politics and small-time gangsterism. 'Wheatle weaves witty patois dialogue and cool, crisp narrative into a tone of playful irony, wholly free of rant or rancour,' said the Telegraph.
A consequence of several meetings with his parents was Wheatle's 2005 book Island Songs, a mature and measured work set largely in Jamaica, epic in scope, tragic yet hilarious, with calm and spacious prose.
Ten years later Alex Wheatle was writing excellent and well-received Young Adult novels, though they were enjoyable for all ages. His 2016 YA novel Crongton Knights, set in a disguised Brixton, won that year's Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and was adapted for a BBC television series due to come out later this year. Cane Warriors (2020) was a riveting fictionalised version of a Jamaican slave rebellion in 1760.
In 2024 Alex Wheatle was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had already spread to his bone marrow. Aware of the propensity of black men to suffer from the disease he embarked on an awareness campaign, drawing on his experiences working in prisons, lecturing about literature and teaching self-help through writing.
In 2008 Wheatle was appointed MBE for services to literature.
Alex Wheatle married, in 1999, Beverley Robinson; they had a daughter and two sons.
Alex Wheatle, born January 3 1963, died March 16 2025
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