Prizewinner in the Novel London Literary Competition 2023 for the novel Animal Nightlife (forthcoming). 

NOVEL LONDON has worked with and promoted over 150 emerging and established writers since 2015. It is now a yearly literary competition and festival focusing on the novel. 

Life on a London council estate leads the entrepreneurial Conrad on a conflicted journey between his ambition, his loyalty to his Jamaican nan and his need to redeem himself. The suppressed scars of a life under the Spanish dictator Franco resurface in Laura’s traumatic coming of age.

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‘Clean living under difficult circumstances.’.  South London in the 1970s and 1980s was the incubator, but a love of books, words and the escapist properties of alphabet soup were largely instilled in this author by resilient immigrant parents, who envisaged a better life in London than the one they’d been forced to flee as Partition refugees. 

Telling stories (making stuff up), sometimes being quite funny and having the ability to kick, or hit a ball, were the salve for an otherwise skittish, bookish child.  As was a love of music.  The author’s formative years happily coinciding with a peculiarly rich strain of pop cultural invention which was never that far away in his little corner of south London.  In reality this meant being spoilt for choice, and somehow present at the birth pangs of hip hop, as well as at the death throes of punk; being privy to the latest variants of soul, reggae and 2-Tone.  Smiley Culture sharing top billing with the ghost of the Specials at the Lewisham Odeon.  And if he just cared to look up, his ears would be filled by the illicit sounds of Pirate radio in the high rises.  At home, teenage years were marked by the discovery of Sam Selvon and the kitchen sink drama of Squeeze for company – gentle tales of ‘us’ and girls from Clapham, but with added bite and resonance for a kid who wanted something more than the limited possibilities of a particular postcode.  Stories too from his Mum and Dad, of the old country, of something bucolic, before men with maps and ideas of ‘purity’ turned their lives inside out, and set them on their way from one South to another.

Those are the strands that have lived in the author from young, and in one way or another have informed his adult life too.  So the bookishness eventually led to a PhD and the reified turf of academia, while the mischief (and scuffle) of the vernacular found expression in youth work.  Not always a happy fit, the suspicion sometimes lingering in both camps, a la Stringer Bell, that this might be  ‘a man without a country’.  But unlike Stringer, the author is still here, still telling stories, and right now that’s probably enough.