Literary Journalism Goes Inside Prison

David Swick is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. He teaches courses to both undergraduate and master’s students, including magazine features, opinion writing, and literary journalism. Before moving into teaching, Swick was an award-winning journalist. His growing body of work includes dozens of magazine articles, hour-long documentaries for CBC Radio, scripts for TV documentaries, nearly 1,800 newspaper columns, and one non-fiction book. He has co-edited two international anthologies of humour in journalism, The Pleasures of the Prose (2015) and The Funniest Pages – International Perspectives on Humor in Journalism (2016).Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln and Honorary Professor at Liverpool Hope University. He has written and edited 49 books on a range of subjects including literary journalism, practical newspaper reporting skills, media ethics, George Orwell, peace journalism, the coverage of US/UK militarism and the secret state, investigative journalism, the Hackgate controversy and digital journalism. He gained a National Teaching Fellowship in 2011 – the highest award for teachers in higher education in the UK – and in 2014 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Journalism Education. From 2013 to 2020 he was chair of the Orwell Society.

This much needed, timely collection engages with prison writing in a radically new way. At a time when civil liberties are increasingly at peril and democratic freedoms are under threat, the diversity of authors presented, the variety of texts studied, and the range of methods showcased reveal the deep commitment and manifest strike force of literary journalism.As the editors rightly argue, immersion is key to the genre. Literary journalism allows for innovative approaches and original insights, not only by incarcerated people but by journalists skilled at overcoming obstacles.The editors’ tour de force lies in presenting chapters focusing on both well-known – Mandela, Boochani, Koestler, Orwell, Conover – and unexpected case studies. Together, they convincingly make the case that literary journalism is an excellent genre to tell inspirational stories of courage and resilience.Isabelle Meuret, Associate Professor, Université Libre de Bruxelles, BelgiumThis remarkable book of scholarship examines the unique power of literary journalism across the globe to illuminate one of life’s darkest experiences. It explores questions pivotal to the field of literary journalism studies and our emerging understanding of prison life.These include… what might immersion reporting reveal when the writer is incarcerated? How can journalists from “outside” navigate the tensions between prisoners’ values and their own? How can literary journalism about prison enrich and be enriched by other storytelling genres: memoir, letters, oral histories, audio narratives, encrypted digital messages, even songwriting? And how can anyone — reporter or subject — write without restraint about a world of restraints?Lisa Phillips, Associate Professor, Digital Media and Journalism, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY, USA

• Introduction: Intimate Understanding through Profound ImmersionPart 1Nothing Barred: How Reporting Can Humanise the Criminal ‘Other’1. On Death Row: Giving Voice to Apartheid’s Forgotten Prisoners2. ‘Feeling the Facts’: Literary Journalism, Colonialism and Behrouz Boochani’sNo Friend but the Mountains3. ‘We Risked a Whole Newspaper’: Thami Mkhwanazi’s Robben Island Seriesand the Weekly MailPart 2Fully Inside? The Challenges of ‘Immersion’ Reporting4. Writing from the Inside: First-Person Reportage of Prison Life by the Incarcerated5. The Sorry Places: Cristina Rathbone’s A World Apart6. The Architecture of Immersive Writing: Sites of (Self-)Scrutiny in Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing7. The Hot House: Reporting and Writing Strategies to Navigate Deep ImmersionPart 3Breaking Out: Exploring Diverse Definitions for Literary Journalism8. Dialogues with Death: Fact, Fiction and the Many Adaptations of Arthur Koestler’s Prison Narrative9. George Orwell: Making Writing on Prisons ‘An Art’10. Ear Hustle: Connecting to Prison Life Through a Narrative Podcast11. Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Reportorial Story Songs’ – Grace and Kinship on Death RowAfterword: Journalists’ Many Creative Ways of Covering the Correctional System