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 agonised about the best poem; two entries were of such high quality it made choosing impossible. I was about to say the prize had to be shared when I was told that they were both by the same writer. Here is one of his winning poems, “In a Parallel Universe”, in full:
I found the chimps that typed out the complete works of Shakespeare,
it was infinitely strange.
Gave Schrodinger’s cat a saucer of milk, it drank the lot and ignored it.
Flew from a black hole, eyes shielded from the glare.
Met myself and argued.
I can’t disclose his name, but my visit to the prison with the most entries is one of the prizes, so I’ll have the opportunity to meet him. I probably won’t ask what a writer of such talent is doing in a place like this. But of course I will wonder.
A collection of this year’s entries will be launched on 25 February at a public event at the Free Word Centre in London. The collection will then be available from the English PEN website (englishpen.org) and all winners will receive two copies, as will the libraries who took part.
