Why the PEN competition for writers in prison is hard to resist as a judge

Judging competitions may be soul-consuming work, but this prize for UK prisoners has produced real talent

It’s the email that makes a writer’s heart sink, the one asking if you’re willing to judge a writing competition. Who has the time for such an arduous, soul-consuming, entirely unpaid job? But this request came from English PEN, and I love and admire PEN and the amazing work it does with dispossessed writers around the word. The kicker was that this was a writing competition open to all prisoners in the UK. Who can resist that as a creative writing cohort?

So I set some subjects: “A letter to myself”; “Anything might happen”. And the fat envelope arrived just before Christmas. (Wonderful news! This year had seen a huge increase in the number of entries. Up to 500!). Some of them were handwritten in teensy tiny handwriting (“please excuse the small paper, I don’t have access to more”). Much of the spelling was bad and some of the meanings were difficult to decipher. It’s worth saying that I’m not particularly interested in “good writing”. You can keep your pacey plot and poetic sentiments, your beautiful metaphor and elegant turn of phrase. But give me a voice that stops me in my tracks, or someone who makes me laugh with the sheer audacity of their thought processes, and I’ll smile for a month. By those criteria, it was an amazing competition.

I found the chimps that typed out the complete works of Shakespeare,

it was infinitely strange.

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