Sitting in the light-filled front room of his south London flat, Alex Wheatle is supposed to be talking about the Guardian’s children’s fiction prize, of which he has just become the 50th winner, joining a rollcall that includes Ted Hughes, Philip Pullman, Anita Desai, Mark Haddon and many other greats. But instead he is methodically considering the absence of black authors in broadsheet newspapers.

“It’s interesting being interviewed,” he says, “because one of the things I rail against is how little exposure black writers get after they are published.” He reels off examples: Yvvette Edwards was Man Booker longlisted in 2011 and published her second book this year. “I couldn’t find a feature on her in any of the broadsheets … Irenosen Okojie won a Betty Trask award for her first novel, lots of acclaim, not much coverage. Even Courttia Newland …”

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Wheatle’s political awakening came with the 1981 Brixton riots, which he dramatised in his second novel, East of Acre Lane. Now 53, he made his debut in 1999 with the first of six adult novels, the hard-hitting Brixton Rock, which introduced the volatile Brenton – “a halfbreed bastard of sixteen” – brought up, like Wheatle himself, in a children’s home, and struggling to make a life in a south London hostel: “You can read all the books you want, but that won’t make a difference, ’cos you don’t actually know what it feels like to live my shit of a life,” he tells the exasperated social worker who is called to collect him from a police cell after a brawl.

With fortuitous timing he brought Brenton back for a sequel, Brenton Brown, just as the 2011 riots were kicking off, though this novel was retrospectively set at the height of the new Labour era, placing Brenton as a jobbing decorator, caught between furious street “soldiers” and WMCBs (“wannabe middle-class blacks”) in newly gentrified streets.

Like Wheatle’s previous novels, Brenton Brown was well reviewed, praised for its “robust dialogue, streetwise humour and muscular, mischievous vernacular”. So why did he make the switch to writing for young adult readers?

Disillusionment, Wheatle says, bluntly. Not with writing itself, but with a lack of interest and support from the literary establishment. “Even though I had a good reputation, I always felt a resistance. I didn’t feel like I was making inroads.”

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Though he was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2008, he points out that he was only invited to one literary festival in 14 years. In preparation for meeting him, I could only find one previous newspaper interview. While his YA experience has been very different – “the industry seems to have received me with open arms” – he thinks it is part of a wider problem affecting black and working-class authors.

“I felt like I was this token black writer who writes about ghetto stuff,” Wheatle says. He believes working-class characters are increasingly thin on the ground, while the handful of black writers who are feted often explore sweeping tales of immigrant experience, rather than domestic tales rooted firmly in one place and time. “My books are seen as only for a black demographic, whereas Zadie Smith or Andrea Levy’s were propelled higher than that, so I felt cheated, in a way.”

He sees an echo of this in the way the language in his books is judged. Reviews of his adult novels seldom fail to praise the vivid vernacular (in Brixton Rock - which plays with the name and themes of Brighton Rock - one character inquires about a fight by saying: “What-a-gwarn last night? Someone told me you bust up Terry Flynn”). But there is an assumption that, because he lived in Brixton and is black, his distinctive narrative voices come naturally. Even for Island Songs, which uses Jamaican patois, despite the fact that Wheatle grew up in Croydon, there was little understanding of the “intricacies and hard work” involved.

“I think being a black male is something to do with not being taken seriously. And my background,” he admits. “I didn’t go to university or on a fancy writers’ course, and so I think the respect is grudging – ‘Oh he is just serving his community.’ I am never taken seriously.”

He says he can’t help but compare the treatment of white writers attempting similar work with dialect, noting that Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English – about a 10-year-old pulled into the world of Peckham gangs – was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker prize, and became a play. While Wheatle is “all for” white writers creating black characters (and vice versa), he thinks “the merit of their work is almost always elevated over black writers who have been writing in the same genre. It’s a form of white privilege.”

I didn’t go to university or on a fancy writers’ course, and so I think the respect is grudging

This lack of praise is no longer a problem in the “more diverse” world of YA, where storytelling is prized. His Guardian children’s fiction prize win is for Crongton Knights. It’s the tale of chubby 14-year-old McKay, who lives on the fictional estate of Crongton. Along with a small band of friends, he sets off on a quest to help out a girl, even though it means straying into the territory of a dangerous gang. With sexting, knives and turf wars it risks being worthy, grim or inauthentic. Instead, thanks to Wheatle’s light touch, it is funny and warm-hearted.

Its predecessor, Liccle Bit, was equally sparkling, and followed the tribulations of McKay’s friend Lemar, who is trying to woo the beautiful Venetia, while being pressed into service by a gang leader. It was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie medal, and a third Crongton book is on its way in March – this time focusing on Lemar’s fiery sister Elaine.

Both books capture the excitement and bewilderment of adolescence. But it is the invented, acrobatic dialect that delights. In Crongton, words are “lyrics”, a tendency to snatch makes you “grabilicious”, and a pair of trainers “sex up your feet”.

As McKay struggles with the serious side of life, a fight-prone brother and a father who gambles, the witty language provides comic relief; a thin teacher “would have to run around in a monsoon to get wet”, while a pretty girl is “hotter than Miley Cyrus twerking against a bonfire”. Creating words is a neat way of ensuring that the language in his books doesn’t date; and sidesteps any inauthenticity in his schoolboy slang (“I’m 53, how down with the kids can I be?” Wheatle laughs). The alternative would be unthinkable: “Eavesdropping on the 109 bus! [The kids] would think I was a creep!” In the ultimate compliment, he now hears his slang being used by schoolchildren.

Inspiration, he says, comes from everything from Cary Grant movies to reggae – which gave Wheatle his love of language. He lists the 80s DJs whose “bending and twisting” of words were an early influence. “Papa Levi, Smiley Culture, Asher Senator, Tippa Irie were fantastic,” he sighs. And suddenly, he is a teenager with a night out ahead. “Going to a sound-system clash – you would have all the anticipation of wondering what the DJ’s will come up with? What new phrases and words?”

Wheatle seems genuinely delighted to be nominated for awards, telling me he is “walking on air”. In a similar tone of wonder he describes how, this summer, he joined film director Steve McQueen to write a BBC series about the story of the black community in the UK.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I’m 53, how down with the kids can I be?’ … Wheatle at home. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

“I still see myself sometimes as ‘little Alex’ who never thought he would achieve anything,” he says, recalling a self-image that was the legacy of a childhood in care. “You grow up with this low self-esteem that is hard to fight against.”

He was placed with Lambeth social services when he was just three. His mother was married with four children when she arrived in the UK and fell in love with a Jamaican teacher in Brixton. After their son was born, she returned home and Wheatle’s father struggled to cope.

He was sent to live in Shirley Oaks children’s home village – then the country’s biggest care home. Despite its idyllic name and 80-acre grounds, for many of the children trapped within its walls it was a place of nightmares, where adults could physically, sexually and mentally abuse them with impunity. When I ask Wheatle about his experiences, he flinches, and there is a long pause.

Eventually he reels off the things he was attacked with, from the shoes staff members threw at him to beatings with “the fire poker … anything they could lay their hands on”. The penalty for forgetting to call staff members “auntie” or “uncle”, he has written, was to be “stripped naked, thrown into an empty bath and have a bar of soap forced into your mouth”. One day he was sexually assaulted by a doctor.

The home is now under investigation as part of the government’s wide-ranging sexual abuse inquiry. Shirley Oaks Survivors Association, of which Wheatle is a member, believes a paedophile ring was brought into the home. The mental abuse also left its scars. “One housefather told me, your parents left you on the dock and went back to the jungle. To be told your parent left you, like you’re a bag of rubbish – you believe it. It affects your whole way of seeing the world. You think you are totally worthless.”

His coping mechanism was to “shut out the terrors” of his life. “I would close my eyes and I could be somewhere or someone else; Pelé scoring a goal.” It’s a heartbreaking image – a little boy who can’t even imagine someone saving him. “Many of the people I grew up with, they might have a brother or sister or someone to visit them. I was so alone.”

“You are not aware of how much you are damaged,” he says. “You try not to think about or recall the appalling moments that you had to suffer. You put up a defensive field, and that becomes aggressive because you don’t want anyone to know how vulnerable you are.” As a teenager his pain came out as fury at the world and a willingness to get into fights. He suffered flashbacks, an affliction he passed on to Brenton.

At the age of 15, he moved to Brixton. Having been told “that all black people lived in the jungle”, he was entranced to find a world where his peers “spoke in a different slang, walked in a different style, the fashion was different. It helped me as a writer because I had to pay attention. The cultural lift Brixton gave me took me on the road to half-believing that I do fit into this harsh world.”

Yet he continued to struggle with anger and trust problems, and having left school with no qualifications, slipped into petty crime. Then came the Brixton riots, which, angry at the way the black community was policed, he enthusiastically joined – and which landed him in prison for four months. Once again in an institution and vulnerable, he began to dwell on his loneliness “in a way that made me suicidal. In spite of me learning about my cultural identity and so on … I still had nobody.”

Salvation came in the form of a Rasta cellmate with a lazy eye. “He was the first person I came across who saw some promise in me,” Wheatle says. “Social workers just expected the minimum from me. For the first time in my life I had a mentor who thought I could achieve great things.”

Writing released all the demons for me … I started to write about the children's home, for my own peace of mind

Nelson, as Wheatle affectionately dubbed him, encouraged the young man to learn about his Caribbean heritage, suggesting he read The Black Jacobins by CLR James. Soon Wheatle was devouring everything from Richard Wright to Homer (“someone told me the Iliad was about blood and guts”). Meanwhile the jingles he had begun to write for his reggae sound-system had led him into writing poetry. “Writing released all the demons for me … I started to write about Shirley Oaks – just for myself and my own peace of mind. Brixton Rock was born out of that.”

Today, he says, his past is “something you live with, it comes out in the night time. Those memories still come back, they still haunt me from time to time.” Having the support of family and friends helps. He even tracked down his parents, visiting both as often as he could. Today, with a wife and three grownup sons, he seems so calm it’s impossible to imagine he was ever the angry young man he describes. “I seem empathetic because I know where rage can come from,” he says. “I know how it feels to be unwanted and unloved.”

Becoming a father also calmed him. “I used to have a fight, and not care if I would be killed. But being responsible for someone put me on the road to self-worth.” Now, he admits, he is fascinated with families – which is why they are at the heart of his Crongton books.

“It is me trying to understand how the family dynamic works. How do people react and respond to each other? Because I didn’t grow up with that.” Sitting quietly, beneath the photo montages of his family on the wall, he smiles. “This is my PhD.”