Jackie Kay: Running to Stand Still - Stories from the Inside

Multi-award-winning poet Jackie Kay hosts an evening of performance and debate at the launch of global literacy network English PEN’s Prison Writing Competition Anthology 2013. 

Alongside performances of this year’s prizewinners - selected by Kay from over 400 prisoners’ submissions from across the UK - Kay will be chairing a panel discussion on the lifechanging potential of creative writing in prisons. Joining her are criminologist Helen Nichols, Senior Criminology Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University and researcher into male prisoners’ experiences of education, bestselling author Jake Arnott, who judged the competition in 2011 and whose acclaimed novel The Long Firm was adapted into a double BAFTA winning BBC2 drama, and economist-cum-author Vicky Pryce, who was released from Holloway Prison in May 2013 after an acrimonious speeding-points affair that dominated headlines at the start of last year. 

Kay is an apt ambassador for English PEN’s project. Her passion for the restorative powers of literature in society’s most vulnerable, marginalised women in particular, is well-documented: following a reading she gave to inmates at Holloway women’s prison in 2010 she was drawn to say ‘they were the most perceptive and participatory audience I’ve ever had.’ This will be a truly inspiring evening full of high passion for the power of the English language.