My anonymous teen story became a playground sensation

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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: [email protected] (Photo: Jade LB. Credit: Stuart Simpson)