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My anonymous teen story became a playground sensation

When British schoolgirl Jade LB uploaded a fictional story to her blog – she had no idea it would end up being passed around playgrounds all over London.

In 2005, when London schoolgirl Jade LB was just 13, she got a computer for her birthday and began writing a fictional story on it – the sometimes raunchy, sometimes disturbing adventures of a 17-year-old girl called Keisha. Written in a mixture of text language, slang and patois, the story became legendary and was passed around playgrounds all over London. But when she first put it online with a promise to post a new chapter every two weeks, Jade had no idea of the impact it would have, or how Keisha would shape her life for years to come. Her book, Keisha the Sket, is out now. The readings you heard were by Nadia Rose.

Burhan Sönmez is now a prize-winning novelist, but when he was growing up in Turkey, a teenager of Kurdish origin, he had ambitions to be a lawyer. In the early 1980s he moved to Istanbul to begin his law degree, but these were dangerous times in Turkey. In 1980 there was a military coup in the country, and a wave of brutal repression, arrests and torture followed. Burhan tells Jo Fidgen about his detention in Istanbul and how he and his fellow inmates would escape into their imaginations to cope with torture and interrogation. This interview was first broadcast in December 2016.

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com

(Photo: Jade LB. Credit: Stuart Simpson)

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41 minutes

Last on

Thu 25 Nov 2021 03:06GMT

Broadcasts

  • Wed 24 Nov 2021 12:06GMT
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  • Thu 25 Nov 2021 03:06GMT

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Podcast: Lives Less Ordinary

Podcast: Lives Less Ordinary

Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected