I have a longstanding interest in and professional involvement with criminal justice. Everything from perpetrator and abuser tactics to the formal processes of reporting, evidence-gathering, trial and conviction, issues of incarceration and punishment, questions of justice and revenge, victim blaming and perpetrator excusal, rehabilitation and recidivism, society and culture, law and criminality, fear and trust, inequality and discrimination, stigma and solutions, peace, justice and harmony. I began doing prison work in 2012 (around the same time I began the outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers) and have spoken and written about these issues ever since. Within secure settings I ran workshops on creative writing, critical thinking and performance.
This year I've been working with Koestler Arts, a leading prison charity which Koestler Arts works with prisons, young offender institutions and secure hospitals as well as youth offending teams, detention and probation services across the UK. We run The Koestler Awards, a major annual arts programme to which people in these environments across the UK submit work into 53 creative categories from Poetry to Screenplay, Hip Hop, Rap and Grime to Choral Music, Fashion to Woodcraft, Ceramics to Graphic Novel. We receive well over 7,000 entries across all categories.Every year we celebrate the prize with a very popular art exhibition, which for the last 18 years has been held at Southbank Centre. Our exhibition curators and judges have included Ai Weiwei, Jeremy Deller, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Antony Gormley, Grayson Perry, Bob and Roberta Smith, Speech Debelle and Sarah Lucas. Every other year we publish a poetry anthology, with forewords written (so far) by Jackie Kay, Inua Ellams, Benjamin Zephaniah, Joelle Taylor and George the Poet. This year, our exhibition curators are the Parental Imprisonment Collective: a group of young people with lived experience of growing up with a parent in prison. This year's exhibition is called Rock, Paper, Scissors, it's in the very cool Undercroft space behind the skatepark and it's on until 29th November.
In the writing category of this year's Koestler Awards competition, writing judges included the UK’s prison reading laureate Lee Child, alongside creators from across all sectors of the UK arts and senior figures from The Forward Arts Foundation, the London Writers’ Salon, the London Library, the Poetry Translation Centre, Faber and the BBC. Visual arts judges included figures from Tate Modern, Art on a Postcard, the National Portrait Gallery, the Paul Mellon Centre, Art on the Underground, PhotoFusion, the Craft Council, IKON gallery, The Photographers Gallery, V&A East and The Horniman Museum.
INVITE: On Saturday 24th October at 4pm Southbank Centre is hosting Words In, Words Out, a panel discussion about the power of writing, reading and creativity in prisons, in collaboration with Koestler Arts and Dua Lipa’s Service 95 book club. The event will be in the Level 5 Function Room and it’s part of Southbank’s annual London Literature Festival. Get your tickets here.
The event will be chaired by me and I am so happy to introduce my guests: Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, writer and philosophy teacher Andy West and film-maker and storyteller Daisy-May Hudson. Singer-songwriter and actor Ray BLK will be performing a selection of poetry entered for the 2026 Koestler Awards. Full biogs of our speakers are below. Please join us.
Ray BLK is an actor, songwriter and singer who appeared in the role of Prison Shrink
in the celebrated film Wasteman as well as taking the lead in Candice Carty-
Williams’ television series Champion. She will soon be appearing in Michaela Coel’s
hugely anticipated new BBC series First Day on Earth.
Panel speaker: Daisy-May Hudson
Daisy-May Hudson is a BAFTA and BIFA award winning film-maker and storyteller.
Through her powerful and acclaimed films Holloway, Lollipop and Halfway she has
dramatised and given voice to the experiences of homelessness, women in prison
and motherhood after custody.
Panel speaker: Baroness Helena Kennedy KC
Helena Kennedy is a leading barrister and an expert in human rights law, civil
liberties and constitutional issues and a founding member of Doughty Street
Chambers. As well as leading a multitude of civil rights, arts and culture and social
justice initiatives, she is the author of Eve Was Shaped: How British Justice is Failing
Women and Just Law: The Changing Face of Justice.
Andy West has taught philosophy in prisons for over a decade. He is the author of
the memoir, The life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to be Free
which was inspired by these experiences and by his experience of having a father,
uncle and brother in prison. It was adapted into the hit BBC series Waiting for the
Out.
the memoir, The life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to be Free
which was inspired by these experiences and by his experience of having a father,
uncle and brother in prison. It was adapted into the hit BBC series Waiting for the
Out.
