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.

Introduction: Intimate Understanding through Profound Immersion

Part 1
Nothing Barred: How Reporting Can Humanise the Criminal ‘Other’

1. On Death Row: Giving Voice to Apartheid’s Forgotten Prisoners

2. ‘Feeling the Facts’: Literary Journalism, Colonialism and Behrouz Boochani’s
No Friend but the Mountains

3. ‘We Risked a Whole Newspaper’: Thami Mkhwanazi’s Robben Island Series
and the Weekly Mail

Part 2
Fully Inside? The Challenges of ‘Immersion’ Reporting

4. Writing from the Inside: First-Person Reportage of Prison Life by the Incarcerated

5. The Sorry Places: Cristina Rathbone’s A World Apart

6. The Architecture of Immersive Writing: Sites of (Self-)Scrutiny in Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

7. The Hot House: Reporting and Writing Strategies to Navigate Deep Immersion

Part 3
Breaking Out: Exploring Diverse Definitions for Literary Journalism

8. Dialogues with Death: Fact, Fiction and the Many Adaptations of Arthur Koestler’s Prison Narrative

9. George Orwell: Making Writing on Prisons ‘An Art’

10. Ear Hustle: Connecting to Prison Life Through a Narrative Podcast

11. Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Reportorial Story Songs’ – Grace and Kinship on Death Row

Afterword: Journalists’ Many Creative Ways of Covering the Correctional System