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.
