Former Jamaica College (JC) Manning Cup footballer Alton Allen has travelled a long way from the streets of Denham Town where he grew up, but nearly three decades after leaving Jamaica for the United States, the community and the people he knew there continue to shape the stories he tells.

Allen, who continued his playing career at the collegiate level in the United States, is preparing for the October 13 release of his second novel, The Man in the Yellow Shirt.

It follows his 2023 debut,

Denham Town, and while the two books explore different themes, they are connected by Allen’s determination to tell Jamaican stories from the perspective of someone who lived them.

For Allen, writing is about considerably more than becoming a published author. It is about giving a voice to people whose stories he believes have too often gone unheard.

“I knew the environment that I grew up in, and I knew what transpired during that time,” Allen said. “And I also knew that no matter what, I was going to write about what happened during that time, because I knew the voices couldn’t translate what was going on.”

Allen believed many of the people around him would never have their experiences heard beyond the confines of their communities.

“I knew the voices couldn’t reach the masses,” he said. “I knew that it was up to me to actually let the world know what happened — for good or for bad.”

Allen grew up in Denham Town and attended St Alban’s Primary School before gaining admission to Jamaica College in 1990.

For his family, it was a significant achievement. Allen recalls being the first member of his family to pass the Common Entrance Examination that took him to the Old Hope Road institution. At JC, football became an important part of his development. He played Pepsi football before graduating to Manning Cup, spending seven years at the school through sixth form.

But while Allen was pursuing his education and football, events unfolding in his home community were leaving an entirely different impression on the teenager. In 1994, Denham Town was caught amid a period of deadly violence involving neighbouring communities of Rema and Tivoli Gardens.

Allen remembers his community being particularly vulnerable because of its location. As he describes it, when opposing factions clashed, Denham Town was often caught in the middle.

He lived on King Street. “When they meet in the middle, gunfights ensued,” Allen recalled.

For the residents trapped between the factions, the consequences could be devastating. People were killed, normal life was disrupted, and some residents eventually fled the community. But what stayed with Allen was not simply the gunfire or the body count, it was what that environment did to people.

Allen left Jamaica for the United States in 1997 and enrolled at Nassau Community College, where football provided another avenue for his development. He attended Nassau from 1997 to 1999 and was part of teams that won national championships in consecutive years — 1997 and 1998. Allen also earned first-team All-Region honours in 1997. Those performances helped create further opportunities.

He subsequently earned a scholarship to Stony Brook University, where he played for another two years and earned a degree in English literature. The choice of study would prove significant.

Long before publishing his first novel, Allen said he believed that writing was his destiny.

“I always felt like I was gonna write books,” he recalled.

The stories he wanted to tell were already inside him.

Published in 2023, Denham Town is fiction, but the world Allen creates is rooted in the violence and social pressures he witnessed growing up in West Kingston, particularly during 1994. Allen remembers young men being placed in situations in which remaining neutral could itself become dangerous. With Denham Town caught between warring factions, he said some young men were pressured to choose sides. A person who wanted nothing to do with the conflict could still be suspected of supporting the other side. For some, Allen said, survival itself could force choices.

“Chances are he’d get threatened and say, if you don’t choose a side, you’re gonna die,” he recalled.

It is that moral complexity that Allen wanted to explore in Denham Town.

Rather than create a story populated simply by gunmen and victims, he wanted readers to see the human beings behind those labels and understand some of the circumstances that could push otherwise ordinary people towards decisions they might never have contemplated.

One of those characters is Gregory.

Gregory was inspired by someone Allen actually knew in Denham Town, a young man Allen remembers as neither a fighter nor a hardened criminal.

“He’s no bad man, he’s no gunman,” Allen said.

The real-life person on whom Gregory was based was eventually killed gruesomely. That knowledge gives Allen’s fictional character added significance. Gregory becomes a vehicle through which he examines what can happen when people who might otherwise have wanted no part of violence find themselves trapped by the environment around them.

Allen’s purpose is not to romanticise criminality or excuse the actions of those who committed violence. Instead, he wants readers to understand that the label eventually attached to someone does not necessarily explain the journey that took him there.

“I kind of humanised them a little bit because I knew what they went through,” he explained. “It’s more a character- driven book rather than just a book that’s just divulging in violence and stuff like that.”

The novel is fictional, but Allen’s perspective comes from having lived in the community, witnessed the environment, and known some of the people whose experiences helped inspire his characters.

“There was voiceless people there, and I needed to tell the world what happened,” he said.

Allen’s second novel moves in a different direction, but does not completely leave Denham Town behind.

The Man in the Yellow Shirt

brings back four characters from his first novel, including

Denham Town’s main protagonist, Noah Hutchinson.

There is no single protagonist driving the new book in the conventional sense. Instead, Allen uses the characters and their experiences to explore a broader idea about recognition, gratitude, time, and the people whose contributions to our lives often go unnoticed.

The catalyst for the story came from something Allen experienced at a party in Jamaica when he was 16.

He is reluctant to disclose exactly what occurred at that party because of how central it is to the book. But that experience, refracted through Noah and three other returning characters from Denham Town, provided the foundation for The Man in the Yellow Shirt.

Allen describes the new novel as deeper and more introspective than its predecessor. While Denham Town examines people shaped by difficult circumstances, The Man in the Yellow Shirt asks readers to think about the people who quietly shape others.

Who is the man in the yellow shirt? The title is metaphorical.

For Allen, the man in the yellow shirt represents the people who influence, encourage, and enable others without necessarily receiving recognition for their contribution. They are not always the famous people whose accomplishments are celebrated publicly. They might be the parent, teacher, coach, neighbour, friend, or mechanic whose work and influence make other people’s achievements possible. “We get caught up in thinking about everything else in the outside world, but the people that are most closest to us, that inspire us, we kind of overlook them a lot,” Allen explained.

Time is a recurring motif in the novel because recognition, when it finally comes, can come too late.

“We overlook a lot of people, and time has caught up with us,” Allen said. “Time has caught up with them, and before you know it, we don’t have those people.”

It is a significantly more hopeful premise than the one underpinning Denham Town.

“We’re just not looking at each other like we should, and we’re not looking at each other when we should,” Allen said.

His hope is that readers finish the book thinking not merely about its characters, but about the overlooked people in their own lives.

“I want everybody to read it and turn to the people that we normally overlook and say, ‘Hey, thank you so much, and you did a great job.’ ” Allen’s route to becoming an author has hardly been conventional. After graduating from university, he worked for several years with an organisation that cared for people with mental disabilities. Allen had worked at Costco during summers while attending school in New York. He later relocated to Atlanta, and after finding that continuing in the same field was difficult, he pivoted to something familiar, returning to the company as an alternative while considering his next move.

He never left. Some 20 years later, Allen works as a receiver at a Costco depot, helping process products for distribution to stores. Away from work, however, the ambition he had carried since his younger years has become reality. Both Denham Town and The Man in the Yellow Shirt are self-published and distributed through Amazon and the Ingram distribution network.

And Allen has no intention of stopping at two books. He believes he has found what he describes as his literary “lane”. It is rooted in an unusual combination of experiences: growing up in inner-city Kingston, attending one of Jamaica’s traditional high schools, playing high-level schoolboy and collegiate football, migrating to the United States, and spending much of his adult life in the Jamaican Diaspora. He believes that background allows him to write about Jamaican life from a perspective that is often missing.

“There’s not a lot of Jamaican writers in this world that actually grew up in the system that I grew up in, grew up in the neighbourhood that I grew up in,” Allen said.

That does not mean every book will focus on violence or hardship. Allen believes Jamaican stories must acknowledge hardship because it is part of the experience of many people, but he also wants his work to contain humour and hope.

“It’s a mixture,” he explained. “You put in the hardship because you can’t overlook the hardship that the Jamaican public has. But you’re also going to put in humour, you may put in hopefulness.”

That, Allen says, is where he sees his future as a writer.

“There’s a void missing in Jamaican writing that I want to kind of fulfil right now.”

It is an ambitious declaration from the former Manning Cup footballer, but the path between the boy from Denham Town and the author Allen has become is perhaps not as unlikely as it initially appears.

Football helped carry him from Jamaica to an American college education. Studying English literature helped provide another means of understanding and expressing the world he knew. And the people and events he witnessed growing up in West Kingston gave him stories he never quite left behind.

Denham Town allowed Allen to begin telling those stories. With The Man in the Yellow Shirt, he is asking readers to do something else: Look around. Recognise the people who helped shape you. And, before time runs out, tell them that they mattered.