Alex Wheatle: ‘I have nightmarish moments where mypast comesback andhitsme’

The prize-winning author's life is now an episode of Steve McQueen's hit series Small Axe. He talks about working on the project and his latest novel, based on a Jamaican slave uprising

Amid the brunchtime clatter of a busy south London cafe, Alex Wheatle is talking about how, lately, he has been considering 1970s pop culture and the way it has shaped and warped his perception of self. I grew up with Tarzan on TV; Tarzan beating up all the black guys he came across and being able to talk to the animals while the black people couldn't," he says. And I hate to admit it, but when I was 10 or 11, I actually cheered for Tarzan when he was fighting with a so-called savage'. It was only later that I thought: I think I've got that wrong.'"

In many ways, Wheatle's 20-year writing career has been about correcting that wrong. Because if the focus of the author's extraordinary early years was on mistruths around his heritage - about its history, its value, its implicit inferiority to a loin-clothed white saviour - then the intervening period has been all about creating the depictions of nuanced black heroism he was denied as a child.