Released for the final time in 2017 and at that point in his 30s and homeless, Mentesh found himself sleeping on his sister’s sofa before he moved to a hostel. <\/p>\n
He then met his now-wife and after finding out she was pregnant “that was it, and I said, ‘what do I do from here?'”.<\/p>\n
Building on the education he had gained while in jail, he first went to college for two years before attending Queen Mary University where he gained a degree in business management.<\/p>\n
Job placements followed, as well as work with charities, before he set up Anabranch, a company which works to rehabilitate prisoners.<\/p>\n
Mentesh says the firm’s name, taken from the part of a river that splits off before reconnecting with the main waterway further downstream, is apt to his own story.<\/p>\n
“I was part of society for a little bit and then I was removed from it, and then I was put back further downstream,” he says.<\/p>\n
Along with this work, he remains a keen book advocate, working with charities to support literacy programmes, as well as still being a prolific reader. <\/p>\n
The next book on his reading list is Previous Engagements by Bruce Shand, the Queen’s father. She gave it to him following the BBC documentary.<\/p>\n
The book examines how Shand came to love books while a prisoner of war during World War Two, something Mentesh relates to from his discovery of The Eagle Has Landed in his first prison cell.<\/p>\n
“For me, books meant a whole lot more than just passing time,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I thought I was just getting knowledge… I didn’t know a book actually has the power to change a person.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Released for the final time in 2017 and at that point in his 30s and homeless, Mentesh found…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-805430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}