How a Prison Book Club Turned One Man’s Life Around

“A book club in prison is the best thing on planet Earth, it really is,” says Omar Mentesh, 44, who cycled in and out of jail for nearly two decades starting in his teenage years. He credits reading with giving people who struggle to open up a way in: “It’s just people sharing, from all walks of life… and when they’re in the book club, they find the book actually leads the conversation into other things. And I think for people who struggle to open up it was great.”

Mentesh, from South Woodford in east London, appears in a new BBC documentary fronted by Queen Camilla, The Book That Changed My Life, which follows five people whose lives were reshaped by reading. For him, what began as an escape from his circumstances became something far more profound.

He grew up on Camden’s Maiden Lane Estate — “a perfect estate” for a child, he tells BBC London, but also somewhere “a kid shouldn’t go”. Aged five, he and friends crawled through a fence gap onto a nearby railway line. “I remember taking a step forward and just feeling like someone was picking me up and was shaking me – and obviously I was being electrocuted,” he recalls. His rubber-soled shoes likely saved his life, though “the electricity had to exit somewhere and it exited through my head.”

He woke in hospital needing plastic surgery because his hands “were melted”, and developed speech problems. Struggling at school with bandaged hands — “I just couldn’t write, it just felt like everyone else is cracking on and I just can’t do it” — he began truanting. As his parents separated, his older brothers turned to crime to support the family, and he followed their example, eventually breaking into cars.

By 15 he had served his first prison sentence. Alone in a cell at Feltham Young Offender Institution, he found a copy of Jack Higgins’s novel The Eagle Has Landed. “It could have been any book, but I think that book there, the cover, it just enticed me,” he says. He understood little of it at first, but the discovery mattered more than the content: “once you appreciate reading, the path is set, the foundations are set, and as long as you keep reading, change can only come.”

Further prison terms followed as he drifted back into organised crime, stealing equipment to order while avoiding violence by his own account. “I had to wait for that merry-go-round to go again, to read, develop my personality, my strengths, my values,” he says. His final offence, a jewellery store burglary, went wrong when a victim was present inside — something he says “didn’t sit well” and that he will “forever apologise and regret”.

Jailed for seven years, reduced to five-and-a-half on appeal, Mentesh used the sentence to catch up on his lost education and took on a role supporting black and minority ethnic prisoners. Released in 2017, homeless and in his 30s, he slept on his sister’s sofa until learning his now-wife was pregnant — a turning point that pushed him into college and later a business management degree at Queen Mary University.

He went on to found Anabranch, a company that works to rehabilitate prisoners, named after a river channel that splits away before rejoining the main waterway further downstream — a fitting metaphor, he says, for his own path back into society. Still a prolific reader and literacy campaigner, his next book is Previous Engagements by Bruce Shand, the late Queen’s father, given to him by Queen Camilla following the documentary.

Source: BBC News