Alex Wheatle

Biography

Alex Alphonso Wheatle MBE (3 January 1963 – 16 March 2025) was a British novelist known as the Bard of Brixton, who was sentenced to a term of imprisonment after the 1981 Brixton riot in London. Wheatle spent much of his childhood in a Shirley Oaks Children's Home in Croydon. At the age of 16, he was a founding member of the Crucial Rocker soundsystem; his DJ name was Yardman Irie. He wrote lyrics about everyday life in Brixton, south London. By 1980, Wheatle was living in a social services hostel in Brixton, and he participated in the 1981 Brixton riots and their aftermath. While serving his resulting sentence, he read authors such as Chester Himes, Richard Wright, C. L. R. James and John Steinbeck. Wheatle's cellmate, a Rastafari, was the one who encouraged Wheatle to start reading books and care about his education. He featured aspects of his life in his books, such as East of Acre Lane characters Yardman Irie and Jah Nelson. In 2020, Wheatle's early life was dramatised by Steve McQueen in the Small Axe film Alex Wheatle. Wheatle died from prostate cancer on 16 March 2025, at the age of 62, just a little over week before Crongton, the BBC adaptation of his YA series of novels, began airing on BBC3 on 24 March.