My earliest reading memory From when I was five or six years old, I remember picking up discarded comics and magazines from my dormitory floor in the children’s home where I lived. They included the Beano, Whizzer and Chips, the Dandy and Scorcher. I read them under my bedcovers with the aid of a bicycle light. My favourite book growing up Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I read it when I was about eight. I closed my eyes and imagined escaping my predicament and sailing on the Hispaniola with Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. The book that changed me as a teenager I read The Black Jacobins by CLR James when I was serving time in prison following the 1981 Brixton uprising. I was 18. It was the first time I had learned of an account of a slave revolt written by a black writer. Up to that point, I had always believed that enslaved black people in the Caribbean had been submissive and had no coordinated strategy in their fight for freedom. The writer who changed my mind In prison, I found Bleak House a little too dense, but a few years later, I read A Christmas Carol. Obviously, Charles Dickens had an empathy for the poor. He placed them front and centre, making them visible to society. I believe every aspiring MP should be compelled to read this classic text. The book that made me want to be a writer I read Iceberg Slim’s Pimp in my mid-20s. It was a visceral account of a man living on the edge and breaking society’s rules. It employed the vernacular of the inner-city streets. It freed me to create my villainous Brixton characters without any apology and to present them how they lived, breathed and spoke. The author I came back to I was introduced to the great James Baldwin whilst serving time in prison. I read the blurbs of his novels but the narratives, at that point in my life, didn’t attract me. Now, he’s one of my favourite authors. He was way ahead of his time. His collections of essays in Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time are so relevant today. The book I reread The book I return to is Timothy White’s Bob Marley biography, Catch a Fire. Throughout my life, there were times I needed reminding that someone born into desperate poverty and minimal potential, who clings on to a grain of hope, can eventually achieve. Inspirational. The book I could never read again A friend of mine urged me to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I tried the first 30 pages and gave up. If somebody insists that I read it again, I’ll smack them with a hardbound copy! The book I discovered later in life A couple of years before the pandemic, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a book festival in Auckland, New Zealand. While there, I purchased a copy of Ernest Shackleton’s South. It’s the compelling account of how his ship, Endurance, was locked in an ice pack in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. Leaving most of his crew behind on a remote uninhabited outcrop, in a much smaller boat, he navigated 800 miles of freezing, soaring seas and ice floes to South Georgia where a rescue party was organised to save the men left behind. It is one of the most thrilling examples of human endurance I have ever read. The book I am currently reading In Malorie Blackman’s brilliant biography, Just Sayin’, I have found parallels to my own life. She’s the light children’s writers of colour and diversity all follow. My comfort read I tend to reach for sporting biographies for my comfort reading. At present I’m reading Guillem Balague’s biography of the great footballer, Lionel Messi. Alex Wheatle’s latest young adult novel is Kemosha of the Caribbean (Andersen Press); his memoir, Sufferah: The Memoir of a Brixton Reggae-Head, will be published in July by Arcadia.