Authors Of The Estate: A Lesson In Reclaiming Your Narrative

“I’m the beginning of something,” thought André Anderson after coming home from a trip to Jamaica. He had gone looking for roots and returned facing forward. “Someone will check for me when they want to know where they got their name from, why they look the way they look, or why they have a propensity to write so much," he says. “So I've made sure that everything is documented.”

The founder of independent art college Freedom And Balance had already started. On that trip, he’d taken copies of Authors Of The Estate for his family – the book he conceived and produced three years earlier in 2015, featuring the stories of people from St Raphael’s Estate in northwest London, where he grew up, delivered to all 1,000 homes.

“Very few times have estates been documented in a way that proposes something new. Our intention was for our story to be presented in its most truthful, beautiful way,” he explains.

A second edition soon followed, featuring 22 young writers from the Chalkhill in Wembley. It was the first project by Freedom And Balance – then a collective including Nabil Al-Kinani, Abdou Cissé and Andriana Lagoudes.

“If we allow outsiders to depict us solely according to their perceptions of who they think we are, then we are setting ourselves up for failure, as the archives and records will preserve those portrayals,” says Nabil. “By telling our own stories, we contradict and complicate those narratives, leaving readers with a choice: believe a narrative created by an external observer, or listen to a one created by the source?”

That conviction has run through everything since: a documentary, an expanded curriculum for Freedom And Balance and more workshops – all designed to put the narrative firmly back with those whose stories are being told.

On 24 October, the Authors Of The Estate team bring their storytelling workshop to the London Literature Festival, in a line-up curated by Dua and the Service95 Book Club (find out more here). Here, André traces where it began.

When I was younger, I used to self-publish books.That led to an Adidas campaign and an internship at a creative agency in Montreal where I met a guy called Charles, which was the first time I’d met a creative Black man in a position of power. He read my first book, Ultra – which I wrote entirely on my BlackBerry on my way to college – and he said, “This is beautiful, and the reason why is because something that you wrote when you were on a train has now taken you all over the world.”

I went back to my estate, which had a dark reputation at that time. I realised that me telling my story, in my own way, allowed me to go places that I wouldn't have otherwise. So I was like, There's not a crazy difference between me and those I go to school with; or between me and my neighbour. So what happens if I share what I learned with them? Not long after, the opportunity for funding for Authors Of The Estate came about. I went to Nathaniel Télémaque, my next door neighbour, with the idea. He was on it. It was the first time where, rather than me just writing a book and trying to present it to my community, I was presenting the possibility to my community, and then we explored it together.

Often, we see storytelling as being reflective – almost passive. I see telling stories as propositional. You're saying something that's happened, but you're also proposing new possibilities.

We've had, on many occasions, journalists or people with cameras coming to document Authors Of The Estate. When you watch the video back, it's like, Oh, you're doing what we just undone. You're taking pictures of the groggy streets and plastic bags in the wind – that's not the image we were painting, and we live here. I think Authors is one of the few ways in which council estates are proposed as: Yes, things happen here, but also we do come together. I think that can only come from someone who has a very pure heart, who lives in those kinds of areas.

That’s why it made sense for Abdou to be the director for the film when it came out. It would have been hard to find anyone else – the whole project is about reclaiming the power of telling your own story.

I grew up on St Raph’s estate. These people have seen me from a child, with my mum on my way to church or going to school together. It created trust.

Nabil ran the second project. He bought the first Authors Of The Estate book and my friend Naomi made the introduction.

Nabil said, “Let me show you my community, from younger people to people who are in their sixties.” This time, he was the one who had to knock on people's doors. That second book is off the back of his trust and people trusting him, because I wouldn't have been able to just go into the estate like, Hey, you don’t know me, let's make a book.

We had to reinvent the publishing process because publishing, and what writing looks like, can't work in the context we're from.

When you talk about a book, many people say: “I don't really read; I'm not really a writer like that.” A lot of my friends had a hard time in formal education and we've often been told that we're not reaching our potential, or that we're lazy, or we're not that smart. When you’re told that as a child, it can stick with you, and it could then inform how confident you are to pen anything down – let alone your story.

I had to re-present authorship to them, like: “I know you understand authors and writing to be like Charles Dickens, because that's what we've grown up on – that iconography around what a writer is.” Many of the people I was speaking to are rappers. I was like: “If you just take the music out and you put those texts on a page, there's not much difference between you and any other poet, any other writer,” which many of them didn't see at the time.

In 2019, when we were talking about how a council house can be a publishing house, that was truly propositional. Now, in 2026, I’ll go to Nabil’s house and he will come out with two books, and then we’ll go back and forth on what's the best GSM to print the book on, if we should do it in hardback. How much should we sell it for, and how we should market it. We are a publishing house now.

For the first book, I had one word: change. They could interpret that word as they wanted. I left them to their devices and then every couple of weeks, Nathaniel or I would knock on their door and be like, “Where are you at with how you interpret the word?”

The second time, we had people in the room together talking, and they would either go away and write their story themselves, or I’d have to transcribe what someone said. Some people we didn’t actually meet face to face, but we had a conversation on WhatsApp, and those conversations are actually in the book.

The internet today is not the internet tomorrow. Things get deleted, wiped, re-edited all the time. It's important to have something in your house that, when you look at it, you can see it and you know who you are. Growing up in my grandma’s home, she had a ton of photo albums. I hardly ever looked at them, but just them being in the house reinforces the memories of my family.

There’s been many attempts to knock down the estate. So actually, documenting it in such a way and calling it beautiful is also a form of resistance – whereby it can serve the past and the future.

Yes, if people were serious about it. The film would not exist if Abdou was not serious, and the second Authors Of The Estate wouldn’t have happened if Nabil wasn’t serious.

Our intention is that everything that we create, we put seeds in it for another version of it to grow. What I mean by that is, in the first book, there's chapters where it says how to be an author. In the second one, now that we know what a publishing house is and how that works, we say how you can run a publishing house. In everything we’ve done, even in the documentary, we wanted to have information in there so, even if we don't do another Authors Of The Estate, there's seeds in it for someone to do their own version somewhere else.

At the Southbank Centre, we are opening up the opportunity for people to fall back in love with telling their story. We have different exercises, and I think we're going to be launching a game that allows people to creatively explore their ideas in a way that helps them understand themselves, and the people around them, better.

The film will be playing. Some of the authors will be there, Abdou, Nabil and I will be there. There's not a lot of spaces that have free open play for adults (but obviously the whole family can come) and play is where a lot of ideas come from.

Do it for yourself. Take the pressure off. It's better for you to create a horrible draft of a book that only you read and no one sees, than you to not even know what your story is.

There’s not going to be a human like me ever again. The thing that makes us feel out of the group is actually the point. That’s what you need to re-contribute back to the group.

You owe it to yourself to take the time out to ask yourself questions, put together some journals, freestyle. Write whatever's on your mind and then keep doing that for a couple of weeks. By the end of that, read through it and see what story reveals itself.

Discover more about Authors Of The Estate’s session at the London Literature Festival here.