The author was just 13 when her anonymous tales of a London teenager spread across the UK. More than a decade on, Stormzy’s Merky books imprint is bringing Keisha back
Until recently, if you had asked any Black girl between the ages of 25 and 35 if they’d heard of Keisha the Sket, they would a) immediately tell you which secondary school they went to and exactly which class they were in when they heard of her, b) pass on some new unauthorised version or spin-off of the story and c) ask if you knew who the author behind this urban phenomenon was. That is, until the lifestyle platform Black Ballad found the person behind Keisha and posted an article written by her in November 2019. We, the criminally underrepresented Black girls, were finally, in a way, reunited with our literary foremother and the author of the story that somehow reached a large majority of us in around 2005, when social media wasn’t even a thing.
I first encountered Keisha when I was a teenager. I was in a science lesson and one of the girls in the class had the first instalment on her phone. Because of the way it was written – peppered with slang, with symbols in place of words and letters – I didn’t even realise it was a story, I thought I was reading a really long SMS. This was the power of Jade LB’s writing: it felt so real. The instalments were shared via phones and MSN chats across London. Back in the day, girls would message Jade demanding the next chapter of Keisha’s story, so intense was the appetite for it. And this is why, more than a decade later, it is being published by Stormzy’s imprint, #Merky Books.
