Books
Having spent my professional career writing academic textbooks and monographs, I am now enjoying writing trade books. In 2024, I published a memoir, An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the Prison, Restoring a House, Rebuilding Myself, which was Scribe Publications’ nonfiction title of the year.
I had wanted to write a book about my professional life researching prisons, interviewing prisoners, and advising architects on the design of humane, healing and rehabilitative custodial environments for many years. It felt quite brave (or foolhardy) to interweave my professional career with a narrative about my personal life, but what emerged was a story that starts with the question what are prisons for? and broadens it to a much wider reflection on the importance of environment and the meaning of home.
The book underlines my belief that confinement takes many forms – we may experience it in relationships, in our homes, in our bodies, habits and addictions, as well as in prisons as we conventionally think of them. But An Architecture of Hope is ultimately a book about finding freedom, which also comes in many guises.
My next book, Knowing Nick, is a collaboration with a life-sentenced prisoner. It tells the story of Nick’s life, what it has been like to spend 21 years in prison and how he turned his life around at HMP Grendon. It is also the story of our unusual friendship and what we have come to learn about ourselves, as well as each other, in the course of our relationship.
