Welcome to the Knowsley Library event tour with Ashleigh Nugent! Join us for an exciting in-person event at Prescot Library, Prescot Centre. 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.
