On my eighth birthday, I wished to have special powers when I blew out the candles on my cake. I woke up disappointed every day until my ninth birthday when I realised I’d had them all along; they were my imagination. It sounds trite, but growing up on the North Peckham Estate, a marginalised underclass community, my imagination helped me to navigate a world of poverty and crime. I would imagine that the sprawling estate was an international space station, and I was the youngest astronaut in human history. It wasn’t just me that did this; the whole endz keyed into the power of their imaginations, using them to douse the hardship of their current situation, imagine parallel realities and conceive alternate futures. Some used music, some used film, some told surreal stories, some drew art and some wrote fiction. For us, the ability to imbue our realities with fantasy was an essential tool to survive and maybe even thrive.
Author and physicist Femi Fadugba, who also spent some of his formative years in Peckham, captures all of this in his debut book, The Upper World, a thrilling YA story following two south London teenagers, a generation apart, who must work together to rewrite the future and prevent the deaths of their loved ones. Fadugba’s book is compelling and original, making huge waves in the publishing world even before its release in August of last year. A bidding war for film rights soon followed, with Academy Award winner Daniel Kaluuya, who will produce and star in an adaptation for Netflix, eventually winning out. As someone who grew up in an environment similar to Fadugba’s and my own, Kaluuya learned to harness the power
