Edge Hill University
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Aeon, a mixed-up and mixed-race teenager from a leafy Liverpool suburb, is desperate to find his Black roots. He needs to understand the Black identity foisted upon him by his friends and his community. To his growing shame, the only Black people in his life are his dad and his cousin, Increase – but they don’t count. Aeon’s dad is intent on ignoring race and climbing the social ladder. And Increase has taken to demeaning all Black culture since the shady and unresolved death of his father, a ‘Yardie’ gangster.
Aeon’s ambition to find his place in the world – to make something happen – seems set to be fulfilled when he and Increase travel to Jamaica. But in Jamaica, Aeon soon finds that smoking loads of weed, growing messy dreadlocks and wearing massive red boots don’t, necessarily, help him to fit in. Aeon soon lands himself in trouble. He is mugged, stabbed, arrested and banged up in a Jamaican detention centre. There, he is beaten unconscious for being the ‘White boy’. And then it really starts to go wrong.
In fact, Aeon’s journey of self-discovery has only just begun…
‘Blends humour and introspection, poetry and the poignant.’
‘Irreverent, authentic and utterly enthralling. A wonderful book.’
‘Twisty, energetic, voice-led novel, written with humour and skill and drama... Nugent is pure talent.’
Ashleigh is a writer, performer and director at RiseUp. His publishing credits include poetry anthologies, academic journals and magazines. Ashleigh’s debut novel LOCKS was signed to Picador Books in 2021. LOCKS has already received outstanding comments from literary heavyweights such as Raymond Antrobus and Derek Owusu and has been described by legendary screenwriter Jimmy McGovern as “Irreverent, authentic, and utterly enthralling. A wonderful book.”
2021 also saw Ashleigh awarded Artist of the Year in the Liverpool City Region Culture and Creativity Awards. Later that year he co-curated the opening weekend at the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Knowsley, was the first person to perform Shakespeare in its traditional cockpit theatre, and became a special advisor there. But it wasn’t always this way. This new theatre faces the police station where Ashleigh was locked up by racist police many times as a teenager. It faces the pub where he had his first pint, at fourteen years of age. It is built on the car park where he was once threatened with an axe by racist thugs.
It was a trip to Jamaica in 1993 to find identity and escape the racism that found Ashleigh in a Jamaican detention centre. There, Ashleigh discovered, he was seen as the ‘white boy’. These are the events that inspired his debut novel LOCKS. It took Ashleigh nearly 30 years to get from a prison cell in Jamaica to a publishing deal with Picador.
Through his organisation, RiseUp, Ashleigh now teaches others how to see their past challenges as the origin myth of their own Hero’s Journey, how to rewrite their own life stories and how to create their own destinies.
It all starts with your story
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