Created to mark PEN’s seventy-fifth anniversary, This Prison Where I Live gathers poetry, fiction, memoir, letters and testimony by writers imprisoned under dictatorships, colonial regimes, military governments and systems of racial or political repression.

The range is extraordinary: Arthur Koestler, César Vallejo, Nazım Hikmet, Václav Havel, Primo Levi, Osip Mandelstam, Wole Soyinka, Nien Cheng, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and many others appear alongside writers less familiar in English. Rather than arranging the work by nation or chronology, Dowd creates a conversation across cells, regimes and languages. What recurs is not a single heroic posture but the strange compression of prison life: boredom, surveillance, bodily degradation, memory, humour, love and the stubborn manufacture of inward freedom.

The anthology is politically serious without reducing literature to evidence. Its central claim is quieter and more dangerous: imprisonment may control a writer’s movements, but language continues to cross the wall. For readers of prison literature, dissident writing, political history and literature produced under censorship.

First edition, Cassell, 1996. Paperback with creasing, rubbing and edge wear; corners bumped and curled. Binding sound and pages clean.