LOCKS: A Story Based on True Events

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Ashleigh told the ECHO in 2020: "I was a mixed race kid in a white leafy suburb on the outskirts of Liverpool. He said: "I'd never read a book but I started reading voraciously every day, I found myself in a different world, around creative people, studying, changing my mindset and taking control." Ashleigh, who now lives in Moreton, Wirral, said: "We needed to make it clear this is not for stuffy, middle-aged, middle class Shakespeare heads. This is for the people of Knowsley and the wider city region.

I was 21 when I decided to admit to myself I wanted to write and went to college and met others into creative stuff. I met a guy who persuaded me to join a rap band at 21, and we're best friends to this day." A defining part of the book and one of the main reasons for it having such an impact on me was the fact that it’s based on true events and was happening to someone so young on what should have been a positive quest of self-discovery.

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He said: "I got caught with spliffs and ended up banged up, then to court and then put in the Strong Room in the mountains, which was basically an underground dungeon. He said: "When it was happening I thought once I survive this I always wanted to be a writer. But I hated school and left with nothing. The whole education system and figures of authority were my enemy.

What I loved was the injection of humour into this, at times, harrowing journey. It really added something else to the otherwise tense read. Blends humour and introspection, poetry and the poignant' - Derek Owusu, author of the Desmond Elliott Prize-winning That Reminds Me Aeon decides to travel to Jamaica for his seventeenth birthday - partly in search of his roots and partly in search of a party. He travels with his older cousin Increase and they book into Peach Paradise resort in Montego Bay. Aeon soon discovers that he has little in common with the locals, and that Jamaica is not always the party haven he had hoped. His holiday starts badly and gets worse. Twisty, energetic, voice-led . . . Nugent is pure talent' - Raymond Antrobus, author of the Rathbones Folio Prize-winning The Perseverance He travels with his (reluctant) cousin Increase who is eight years his senior. Increase has shunned his heritage after his father (Aeon's uncle) died in the 1981 riots. Jamaica is not kind to Aeon and within a matter of days he is mugged, stabbed, arrested and jailed. Whilst imprisoned, someone he had a run in with is wanting money, going after Increase to get it.

But within days of his arrival, still wearing his boots from St John's market, Ashleigh found himself in the "Strong Room" of a tough Jamaican prison for young men. He spent his 17th birthday inside what he describes as an "underground dungeon", eventually getting bail and fleeing the country while the Jamaican authorities searched for him at the airport. The audience coming want to be entertained. They want to laugh, they want to get angry, they want to get entertained, and they want to leave there going that was dead interesting. So I think I am going to develop it more as a play, because they don’t care whether I think it’s a play. They want to be entertained. In Ashleigh's book, the character is a rebel who soon gets into a fight, gets mugged and then arrested while just being 16. P: The way it talks about your relationship with race – or Aeon’s [the lead character’s] relationship to race – is so pertinent to now, and the confusion that a lot of people are feeling around their own relationship to race. Are you still feeling that now, or have you found a space where you’re comfortable?