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Meet the Outlaw escaping from prisons in protest against indefinite detention
Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn View image in fullscreen Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn This article is more than 1 year old Meet the Outlaw escaping from prisons in protest against indefinite detention This article is more than 1 year old Joe Outlaw is one of 2,921 inmates still on IPP sentences, which were abolished in 2012 It should be impossible to escape from a high-security prison, doubly so for prisoners held on the segregation unit, who are allowed only to exercise in a caged yard. But on 21 June, the summer solstice and the hottest day of the year at that point, Joe Outlaw managed to break through the cage and get on to the roof of HMP Frankland, a Durham prison dubbed “Monster mansion” due to many of its inmates being convicted murderers, terrorists and sex offenders. A local photographer captured Outlaw sunbathing in his underpants as he negotiated with prison officers from the National Tactical Response Group. Some social media users may have recognised Outlaw from TikTok and YouTube, where he used to post protest raps and songs from his cell. View image in fullscreen Screengrab from Joe Outlaw’s YouTube channel. Photograph: YouTube It was a huge embarrassment for the prison service, particularly as Outlaw was on the e-list (escape list) at the time. He shed the yellow and blue jumpsuit that indicates a flight risk only when he breached the cage, prompting huge cheers from the prisoners below. It was not Outlaw’s first rooftop rodeo. An expert climber since his youth, when he escaped from numerous care homes, in April this year he managed to get on to the roof at HMP Manchester, better known as Strangeways, by sneaking off from the healthcare unit and crawling through reels of barbed wire. For 12 soggy hours he sat up there in the driving rain to highlight the plight of prisoners in Wales and England, like himself, who are stuck in jail after being given imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences with no automatic date for release. Designed to protect the public from serious offenders whose crimes did not merit a life sentence, these indeterminate sentences were abolished in 2012 after it became apparent that they were “unclear and inconsistent” and resulted in people languishing in jail for many years, often for quite minor crimes, and with no clear path for release. “FREE IPPZ”, Outlaw wrote on Strangeways’ roof in gloss paint that kept running in the rain. View image in fullscreen Joe Outlaw on the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Photograph: News Images/Alamy Outlaw, now 37, was given an IPP in 2011 after robbing his local takeaway with an imitation firearm while high on drugs. The IPP was imposed, he says, because he already had two firearms offences on his record – including one committed while a juvenile, when he fired a pellet gun in a public park. He knows his crime was serious. “I didn’t hurt him physically, but anyone pointing a gun at anyone is traumatising, and I don’t know what it’s done to [the takeaway worker’s] life. I’ve got to take responsibility for that, and I am sorry for that,” he told the Guardian in one of a series of letters. Outlaw – then going by the name Chris Hordosi, which he changed to Outlaw, his mother’s maiden name, while in prison – was given an IPP with an 18-year tariff, reduced to nine on appeal. Without the IPP element, he would have been eligible for automatic release after four and a half years. Yet 12 years later, he is still in prison, fighting against a system he thinks is rigged to make release all but impossible. He believes the lack of hope has killed other IPPs – 270 so far have died in prison, with 81 taking their own lives. Outlaw says he has tried to kill himself at least once, by setting fire to his cell – which ultimately resulted in an extra conviction for arson. He claims other IPPs have ended up committing murder in prison, figuring out they are basically in for life anyway. After his rooftop protest at Frankland, Outlaw was transferred to HMP Belmarsh, a Category A jail in London that holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in England and Wales. He claims that since 23 June he has been forced to live in “total isolation” on a special unit opened just for him. “I haven’t heard or seen another inmate in almost six months so far. This is not because I’m violent or a danger to anyone. In 13 years I’ve never assaulted a member of staff and I have only had one fight with an inmate [a paedophile in HMP Wakefield]. I have been totally isolated simply because I spoke out in protest against the ongoing illegal imprisonment of IPPs … and to silence my voice and activism,” he said. There is now near-unanimous agreement that IPPs are unfair, with the current justice secretary, Alex Chalk, calling them “a stain” on the justice system. As of 30 September, there were 2,921 IPP prisoners , 1,269 of whom have never been released, with the remaining 1,652 having been recalled to custody. A recent Independent Monitoring Board report on Belmarsh found it was holding four IPP prisoners, including Outlaw, telling ministers: “The Board considers it is inhumane to keep these men in prison for such lengthy periods.” The law is gone but they are still in jail: who will free Britain’s most wronged prisoners? | George Monbiot Read more Last month, Chalk announced reforms that would cut the time that released IPP prisoners serve on licence from 10 to three years. But it remains unclear whether the reforms will benefit Outlaw, who claims he has not been given any information about whether it will give him a pathway for release. He says he carried out his second rooftop protest at Frankland after suffering “horrid levels of abuse and neglect” there. The alternative was suicide, he said: “If I would have not taken that chance to do what I did there I would have ended up hanging myself, I swear to god.” He claims he hid strips of ripped-up bed sheets in his trainers, which he then used to tie himself to the exercise yard cage, while hanging upside down. He then managed to break the cage before he crawled through and on to the roof. “The most shocking thing was that I was in an e-list blue and yellow escape suit at the time, and just six weeks before, I had been on Manchester’s roof,” he said, describing it as “a new level of embarrassment for the Prison Service”, which “begs the question: what if this was a mass murderer or a millionaire drug dealer with a chopper?” Outlaw knows many people may read of his escapades and think: “Joey, no wonder you are not getting out.” But he insists that many far better behaved IPP prisoners are stuck. “Lads have been sweet as a nut, managed to dodge all the war zones, do all the bullshit courses and they still come up with some reason to keep them in,” he wrote. He claims he was originally told “all I had to do was keep my head down, behave and do my [rehabilitation] courses and I’d be back out in no time”. But in reality, he says, “every time lads would complete a course, a new one would be created and the goalposts moved again.” The Parole Board is inherently risk-averse when it comes to IPPs, he says. “They treat people that are in for fights or robbery like they are murderers.” Over 1,800 offenders to have indefinite jail sentences terminated, says MoJ Read more Prisons are corrupt, insists Outlaw. He claims to have watched drones deliver drugs to HMP Manchester every night, and “found myself just smoking weed, sniffing coke, taking Xanax – it was mental, everybody was just on a party mode constantly”. Officers turned a blind eye to rampant smartphone use, he claims, to the point that he started TikTok and YouTube channels to showcase his jailhouse songs, one of which, he claims, gathered more than 150,000 views in three days. He wants readers to put themselves in his shoes when viewing his protests. “What would you do when the people who are meant to be helping you are the ones who are abusing you, when no one around you cares or treats you with respect? There’s people who become your captors who are torturing you on a daily basis … How can you expect a person to change his ways for the better when treated with such disregard?” A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We abolished IPP sentences in 2012 and have already reduced the number of offenders serving them in prison by three-quarters. We have also taken decisive action to curtail IPP licence periods to give rehabilitated people the opportunity to move on with their lives. “Those still in custody are being helped to progress towards release through improved access to rehabilitation programmes and mental health support – but as a judge deemed them to be a high risk to the public the independent Parole Board must decide if they are safe to leave prison.” Explore more on these topics Prisons and probation UK criminal justice North of England England Wales features Share Reuse this content Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn View image in fullscreen Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn This article is more than 1 year old Meet the Outlaw escaping from prisons in protest against indefinite detention This article is more than 1 year old Joe Outlaw is one of 2,921 inmates still on IPP sentences, which were abolished in 2012 It should be impossible to escape from a high-security prison, doubly so for prisoners held on the segregation unit, who are allowed only to exercise in a caged yard. But on 21 June, the summer solstice and the hottest day of the year at that point, Joe Outlaw managed to break through the cage and get on to the roof of HMP Frankland, a Durham prison dubbed “Monster mansion” due to many of its inmates being convicted murderers, terrorists and sex offenders. A local photographer captured Outlaw sunbathing in his underpants as he negotiated with prison officers from the National Tactical Response Group. Some social media users may have recognised Outlaw from TikTok and YouTube, where he used to post protest raps and songs from his cell. View image in fullscreen Screengrab from Joe Outlaw’s YouTube channel. Photograph: YouTube It was a huge embarrassment for the prison service, particularly as Outlaw was on the e-list (escape list) at the time. He shed the yellow and blue jumpsuit that indicates a flight risk only when he breached the cage, prompting huge cheers from the prisoners below. It was not Outlaw’s first rooftop rodeo. An expert climber since his youth, when he escaped from numerous care homes, in April this year he managed to get on to the roof at HMP Manchester, better known as Strangeways, by sneaking off from the healthcare unit and crawling through reels of barbed wire. For 12 soggy hours he sat up there in the driving rain to highlight the plight of prisoners in Wales and England, like himself, who are stuck in jail after being given imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences with no automatic date for release. Designed to protect the public from serious offenders whose crimes did not merit a life sentence, these indeterminate sentences were abolished in 2012 after it became apparent that they were “unclear and inconsistent” and resulted in people languishing in jail for many years, often for quite minor crimes, and with no clear path for release. “FREE IPPZ”, Outlaw wrote on Strangeways’ roof in gloss paint that kept running in the rain. View image in fullscreen Joe Outlaw on the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Photograph: News Images/Alamy Outlaw, now 37, was given an IPP in 2011 after robbing his local takeaway with an imitation firearm while high on drugs. The IPP was imposed, he says, because he already had two firearms offences on his record – including one committed while a juvenile, when he fired a pellet gun in a public park. He knows his crime was serious. “I didn’t hurt him physically, but anyone pointing a gun at anyone is traumatising, and I don’t know what it’s done to [the takeaway worker’s] life. I’ve got to take responsibility for that, and I am sorry for that,” he told the Guardian in one of a series of letters. Outlaw – then going by the name Chris Hordosi, which he changed to Outlaw, his mother’s maiden name, while in prison – was given an IPP with an 18-year tariff, reduced to nine on appeal. Without the IPP element, he would have been eligible for automatic release after four and a half years. Yet 12 years later, he is still in prison, fighting against a system he thinks is rigged to make release all but impossible. He believes the lack of hope has killed other IPPs – 270 so far have died in prison, with 81 taking their own lives. Outlaw says he has tried to kill himself at least once, by setting fire to his cell – which ultimately resulted in an extra conviction for arson. He claims other IPPs have ended up committing murder in prison, figuring out they are basically in for life anyway. After his rooftop protest at Frankland, Outlaw was transferred to HMP Belmarsh, a Category A jail in London that holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in England and Wales. He claims that since 23 June he has been forced to live in “total isolation” on a special unit opened just for him. “I haven’t heard or seen another inmate in almost six months so far. This is not because I’m violent or a danger to anyone. In 13 years I’ve never assaulted a member of staff and I have only had one fight with an inmate [a paedophile in HMP Wakefield]. I have been totally isolated simply because I spoke out in protest against the ongoing illegal imprisonment of IPPs … and to silence my voice and activism,” he said. There is now near-unanimous agreement that IPPs are unfair, with the current justice secretary, Alex Chalk, calling them “a stain” on the justice system. As of 30 September, there were 2,921 IPP prisoners , 1,269 of whom have never been released, with the remaining 1,652 having been recalled to custody. A recent Independent Monitoring Board report on Belmarsh found it was holding four IPP prisoners, including Outlaw, telling ministers: “The Board considers it is inhumane to keep these men in prison for such lengthy periods.” The law is gone but they are still in jail: who will free Britain’s most wronged prisoners? | George Monbiot Read more Last month, Chalk announced reforms that would cut the time that released IPP prisoners serve on licence from 10 to three years. But it remains unclear whether the reforms will benefit Outlaw, who claims he has not been given any information about whether it will give him a pathway for release. He says he carried out his second rooftop protest at Frankland after suffering “horrid levels of abuse and neglect” there. The alternative was suicide, he said: “If I would have not taken that chance to do what I did there I would have ended up hanging myself, I swear to god.” He claims he hid strips of ripped-up bed sheets in his trainers, which he then used to tie himself to the exercise yard cage, while hanging upside down. He then managed to break the cage before he crawled through and on to the roof. “The most shocking thing was that I was in an e-list blue and yellow escape suit at the time, and just six weeks before, I had been on Manchester’s roof,” he said, describing it as “a new level of embarrassment for the Prison Service”, which “begs the question: what if this was a mass murderer or a millionaire drug dealer with a chopper?” Outlaw knows many people may read of his escapades and think: “Joey, no wonder you are not getting out.” But he insists that many far better behaved IPP prisoners are stuck. “Lads have been sweet as a nut, managed to dodge all the war zones, do all the bullshit courses and they still come up with some reason to keep them in,” he wrote. He claims he was originally told “all I had to do was keep my head down, behave and do my [rehabilitation] courses and I’d be back out in no time”. But in reality, he says, “every time lads would complete a course, a new one would be created and the goalposts moved again.” The Parole Board is inherently risk-averse when it comes to IPPs, he says. “They treat people that are in for fights or robbery like they are murderers.” Over 1,800 offenders to have indefinite jail sentences terminated, says MoJ Read more Prisons are corrupt, insists Outlaw. He claims to have watched drones deliver drugs to HMP Manchester every night, and “found myself just smoking weed, sniffing coke, taking Xanax – it was mental, everybody was just on a party mode constantly”. Officers turned a blind eye to rampant smartphone use, he claims, to the point that he started TikTok and YouTube channels to showcase his jailhouse songs, one of which, he claims, gathered more than 150,000 views in three days. He wants readers to put themselves in his shoes when viewing his protests. “What would you do when the people who are meant to be helping you are the ones who are abusing you, when no one around you cares or treats you with respect? There’s people who become your captors who are torturing you on a daily basis … How can you expect a person to change his ways for the better when treated with such disregard?” A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We abolished IPP sentences in 2012 and have already reduced the number of offenders serving them in prison by three-quarters. We have also taken decisive action to curtail IPP licence periods to give rehabilitated people the opportunity to move on with their lives. “Those still in custody are being helped to progress towards release through improved access to rehabilitation programmes and mental health support – but as a judge deemed them to be a high risk to the public the independent Parole Board must decide if they are safe to leave prison.” Explore more on these topics Prisons and probation UK criminal justice North of England England Wales features Share Reuse this content Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn View image in fullscreen Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn View image in fullscreen Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn View image in fullscreen Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn View image in fullscreen Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn Riot police stand by as Joe Outlaw swings his prison jumpsuit on the roof of HMP Frankland. Photograph: Alex Elliott/North News/North News & Pictures northn This article is more than 1 year old Meet the Outlaw escaping from prisons in protest against indefinite detention This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Meet the Outlaw escaping from prisons in protest against indefinite detention This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Meet the Outlaw escaping from prisons in protest against indefinite detention This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Joe Outlaw is one of 2,921 inmates still on IPP sentences, which were abolished in 2012 Joe Outlaw is one of 2,921 inmates still on IPP sentences, which were abolished in 2012 Joe Outlaw is one of 2,921 inmates still on IPP sentences, which were abolished in 2012 It should be impossible to escape from a high-security prison, doubly so for prisoners held on the segregation unit, who are allowed only to exercise in a caged yard. But on 21 June, the summer solstice and the hottest day of the year at that point, Joe Outlaw managed to break through the cage and get on to the roof of HMP Frankland, a Durham prison dubbed “Monster mansion” due to many of its inmates being convicted murderers, terrorists and sex offenders. A local photographer captured Outlaw sunbathing in his underpants as he negotiated with prison officers from the National Tactical Response Group. Some social media users may have recognised Outlaw from TikTok and YouTube, where he used to post protest raps and songs from his cell. View image in fullscreen Screengrab from Joe Outlaw’s YouTube channel. Photograph: YouTube It was a huge embarrassment for the prison service, particularly as Outlaw was on the e-list (escape list) at the time. He shed the yellow and blue jumpsuit that indicates a flight risk only when he breached the cage, prompting huge cheers from the prisoners below. It was not Outlaw’s first rooftop rodeo. An expert climber since his youth, when he escaped from numerous care homes, in April this year he managed to get on to the roof at HMP Manchester, better known as Strangeways, by sneaking off from the healthcare unit and crawling through reels of barbed wire. For 12 soggy hours he sat up there in the driving rain to highlight the plight of prisoners in Wales and England, like himself, who are stuck in jail after being given imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences with no automatic date for release. Designed to protect the public from serious offenders whose crimes did not merit a life sentence, these indeterminate sentences were abolished in 2012 after it became apparent that they were “unclear and inconsistent” and resulted in people languishing in jail for many years, often for quite minor crimes, and with no clear path for release. “FREE IPPZ”, Outlaw wrote on Strangeways’ roof in gloss paint that kept running in the rain. View image in fullscreen Joe Outlaw on the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Photograph: News Images/Alamy Outlaw, now 37, was given an IPP in 2011 after robbing his local takeaway with an imitation firearm while high on drugs. The IPP was imposed, he says, because he already had two firearms offences on his record – including one committed while a juvenile, when he fired a pellet gun in a public park. He knows his crime was serious. “I didn’t hurt him physically, but anyone pointing a gun at anyone is traumatising, and I don’t know what it’s done to [the takeaway worker’s] life. I’ve got to take responsibility for that, and I am sorry for that,” he told the Guardian in one of a series of letters. Outlaw – then going by the name Chris Hordosi, which he changed to Outlaw, his mother’s maiden name, while in prison – was given an IPP with an 18-year tariff, reduced to nine on appeal. Without the IPP element, he would have been eligible for automatic release after four and a half years. Yet 12 years later, he is still in prison, fighting against a system he thinks is rigged to make release all but impossible. He believes the lack of hope has killed other IPPs – 270 so far have died in prison, with 81 taking their own lives. Outlaw says he has tried to kill himself at least once, by setting fire to his cell – which ultimately resulted in an extra conviction for arson. He claims other IPPs have ended up committing murder in prison, figuring out they are basically in for life anyway. After his rooftop protest at Frankland, Outlaw was transferred to HMP Belmarsh, a Category A jail in London that holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in England and Wales. He claims that since 23 June he has been forced to live in “total isolation” on a special unit opened just for him. “I haven’t heard or seen another inmate in almost six months so far. This is not because I’m violent or a danger to anyone. In 13 years I’ve never assaulted a member of staff and I have only had one fight with an inmate [a paedophile in HMP Wakefield]. I have been totally isolated simply because I spoke out in protest against the ongoing illegal imprisonment of IPPs … and to silence my voice and activism,” he said. There is now near-unanimous agreement that IPPs are unfair, with the current justice secretary, Alex Chalk, calling them “a stain” on the justice system. As of 30 September, there were 2,921 IPP prisoners , 1,269 of whom have never been released, with the remaining 1,652 having been recalled to custody. A recent Independent Monitoring Board report on Belmarsh found it was holding four IPP prisoners, including Outlaw, telling ministers: “The Board considers it is inhumane to keep these men in prison for such lengthy periods.” The law is gone but they are still in jail: who will free Britain’s most wronged prisoners? | George Monbiot Read more Last month, Chalk announced reforms that would cut the time that released IPP prisoners serve on licence from 10 to three years. But it remains unclear whether the reforms will benefit Outlaw, who claims he has not been given any information about whether it will give him a pathway for release. He says he carried out his second rooftop protest at Frankland after suffering “horrid levels of abuse and neglect” there. The alternative was suicide, he said: “If I would have not taken that chance to do what I did there I would have ended up hanging myself, I swear to god.” He claims he hid strips of ripped-up bed sheets in his trainers, which he then used to tie himself to the exercise yard cage, while hanging upside down. He then managed to break the cage before he crawled through and on to the roof. “The most shocking thing was that I was in an e-list blue and yellow escape suit at the time, and just six weeks before, I had been on Manchester’s roof,” he said, describing it as “a new level of embarrassment for the Prison Service”, which “begs the question: what if this was a mass murderer or a millionaire drug dealer with a chopper?” Outlaw knows many people may read of his escapades and think: “Joey, no wonder you are not getting out.” But he insists that many far better behaved IPP prisoners are stuck. “Lads have been sweet as a nut, managed to dodge all the war zones, do all the bullshit courses and they still come up with some reason to keep them in,” he wrote. He claims he was originally told “all I had to do was keep my head down, behave and do my [rehabilitation] courses and I’d be back out in no time”. But in reality, he says, “every time lads would complete a course, a new one would be created and the goalposts moved again.” The Parole Board is inherently risk-averse when it comes to IPPs, he says. “They treat people that are in for fights or robbery like they are murderers.” Over 1,800 offenders to have indefinite jail sentences terminated, says MoJ Read more Prisons are corrupt, insists Outlaw. He claims to have watched drones deliver drugs to HMP Manchester every night, and “found myself just smoking weed, sniffing coke, taking Xanax – it was mental, everybody was just on a party mode constantly”. Officers turned a blind eye to rampant smartphone use, he claims, to the point that he started TikTok and YouTube channels to showcase his jailhouse songs, one of which, he claims, gathered more than 150,000 views in three days. He wants readers to put themselves in his shoes when viewing his protests. “What would you do when the people who are meant to be helping you are the ones who are abusing you, when no one around you cares or treats you with respect? There’s people who become your captors who are torturing you on a daily basis … How can you expect a person to change his ways for the better when treated with such disregard?” A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We abolished IPP sentences in 2012 and have already reduced the number of offenders serving them in prison by three-quarters. We have also taken decisive action to curtail IPP licence periods to give rehabilitated people the opportunity to move on with their lives. “Those still in custody are being helped to progress towards release through improved access to rehabilitation programmes and mental health support – but as a judge deemed them to be a high risk to the public the independent Parole Board must decide if they are safe to leave prison.” Explore more on these topics Prisons and probation UK criminal justice North of England England Wales features Share Reuse this content It should be impossible to escape from a high-security prison, doubly so for prisoners held on the segregation unit, who are allowed only to exercise in a caged yard. But on 21 June, the summer solstice and the hottest day of the year at that point, Joe Outlaw managed to break through the cage and get on to the roof of HMP Frankland, a Durham prison dubbed “Monster mansion” due to many of its inmates being convicted murderers, terrorists and sex offenders. A local photographer captured Outlaw sunbathing in his underpants as he negotiated with prison officers from the National Tactical Response Group. Some social media users may have recognised Outlaw from TikTok and YouTube, where he used to post protest raps and songs from his cell. View image in fullscreen Screengrab from Joe Outlaw’s YouTube channel. Photograph: YouTube It was a huge embarrassment for the prison service, particularly as Outlaw was on the e-list (escape list) at the time. He shed the yellow and blue jumpsuit that indicates a flight risk only when he breached the cage, prompting huge cheers from the prisoners below. It was not Outlaw’s first rooftop rodeo. An expert climber since his youth, when he escaped from numerous care homes, in April this year he managed to get on to the roof at HMP Manchester, better known as Strangeways, by sneaking off from the healthcare unit and crawling through reels of barbed wire. For 12 soggy hours he sat up there in the driving rain to highlight the plight of prisoners in Wales and England, like himself, who are stuck in jail after being given imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences with no automatic date for release. Designed to protect the public from serious offenders whose crimes did not merit a life sentence, these indeterminate sentences were abolished in 2012 after it became apparent that they were “unclear and inconsistent” and resulted in people languishing in jail for many years, often for quite minor crimes, and with no clear path for release. “FREE IPPZ”, Outlaw wrote on Strangeways’ roof in gloss paint that kept running in the rain. View image in fullscreen Joe Outlaw on the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Photograph: News Images/Alamy Outlaw, now 37, was given an IPP in 2011 after robbing his local takeaway with an imitation firearm while high on drugs. The IPP was imposed, he says, because he already had two firearms offences on his record – including one committed while a juvenile, when he fired a pellet gun in a public park. He knows his crime was serious. “I didn’t hurt him physically, but anyone pointing a gun at anyone is traumatising, and I don’t know what it’s done to [the takeaway worker’s] life. I’ve got to take responsibility for that, and I am sorry for that,” he told the Guardian in one of a series of letters. Outlaw – then going by the name Chris Hordosi, which he changed to Outlaw, his mother’s maiden name, while in prison – was given an IPP with an 18-year tariff, reduced to nine on appeal. Without the IPP element, he would have been eligible for automatic release after four and a half years. Yet 12 years later, he is still in prison, fighting against a system he thinks is rigged to make release all but impossible. He believes the lack of hope has killed other IPPs – 270 so far have died in prison, with 81 taking their own lives. Outlaw says he has tried to kill himself at least once, by setting fire to his cell – which ultimately resulted in an extra conviction for arson. He claims other IPPs have ended up committing murder in prison, figuring out they are basically in for life anyway. After his rooftop protest at Frankland, Outlaw was transferred to HMP Belmarsh, a Category A jail in London that holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in England and Wales. He claims that since 23 June he has been forced to live in “total isolation” on a special unit opened just for him. “I haven’t heard or seen another inmate in almost six months so far. This is not because I’m violent or a danger to anyone. In 13 years I’ve never assaulted a member of staff and I have only had one fight with an inmate [a paedophile in HMP Wakefield]. I have been totally isolated simply because I spoke out in protest against the ongoing illegal imprisonment of IPPs … and to silence my voice and activism,” he said. There is now near-unanimous agreement that IPPs are unfair, with the current justice secretary, Alex Chalk, calling them “a stain” on the justice system. As of 30 September, there were 2,921 IPP prisoners , 1,269 of whom have never been released, with the remaining 1,652 having been recalled to custody. A recent Independent Monitoring Board report on Belmarsh found it was holding four IPP prisoners, including Outlaw, telling ministers: “The Board considers it is inhumane to keep these men in prison for such lengthy periods.” The law is gone but they are still in jail: who will free Britain’s most wronged prisoners? | George Monbiot Read more Last month, Chalk announced reforms that would cut the time that released IPP prisoners serve on licence from 10 to three years. But it remains unclear whether the reforms will benefit Outlaw, who claims he has not been given any information about whether it will give him a pathway for release. He says he carried out his second rooftop protest at Frankland after suffering “horrid levels of abuse and neglect” there. The alternative was suicide, he said: “If I would have not taken that chance to do what I did there I would have ended up hanging myself, I swear to god.” He claims he hid strips of ripped-up bed sheets in his trainers, which he then used to tie himself to the exercise yard cage, while hanging upside down. He then managed to break the cage before he crawled through and on to the roof. “The most shocking thing was that I was in an e-list blue and yellow escape suit at the time, and just six weeks before, I had been on Manchester’s roof,” he said, describing it as “a new level of embarrassment for the Prison Service”, which “begs the question: what if this was a mass murderer or a millionaire drug dealer with a chopper?” Outlaw knows many people may read of his escapades and think: “Joey, no wonder you are not getting out.” But he insists that many far better behaved IPP prisoners are stuck. “Lads have been sweet as a nut, managed to dodge all the war zones, do all the bullshit courses and they still come up with some reason to keep them in,” he wrote. He claims he was originally told “all I had to do was keep my head down, behave and do my [rehabilitation] courses and I’d be back out in no time”. But in reality, he says, “every time lads would complete a course, a new one would be created and the goalposts moved again.” The Parole Board is inherently risk-averse when it comes to IPPs, he says. “They treat people that are in for fights or robbery like they are murderers.” Over 1,800 offenders to have indefinite jail sentences terminated, says MoJ Read more Prisons are corrupt, insists Outlaw. He claims to have watched drones deliver drugs to HMP Manchester every night, and “found myself just smoking weed, sniffing coke, taking Xanax – it was mental, everybody was just on a party mode constantly”. Officers turned a blind eye to rampant smartphone use, he claims, to the point that he started TikTok and YouTube channels to showcase his jailhouse songs, one of which, he claims, gathered more than 150,000 views in three days. He wants readers to put themselves in his shoes when viewing his protests. “What would you do when the people who are meant to be helping you are the ones who are abusing you, when no one around you cares or treats you with respect? There’s people who become your captors who are torturing you on a daily basis … How can you expect a person to change his ways for the better when treated with such disregard?” A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We abolished IPP sentences in 2012 and have already reduced the number of offenders serving them in prison by three-quarters. We have also taken decisive action to curtail IPP licence periods to give rehabilitated people the opportunity to move on with their lives. “Those still in custody are being helped to progress towards release through improved access to rehabilitation programmes and mental health support – but as a judge deemed them to be a high risk to the public the independent Parole Board must decide if they are safe to leave prison.” Explore more on these topics Prisons and probation UK criminal justice North of England England Wales features Share Reuse this content It should be impossible to escape from a high-security prison, doubly so for prisoners held on the segregation unit, who are allowed only to exercise in a caged yard. But on 21 June, the summer solstice and the hottest day of the year at that point, Joe Outlaw managed to break through the cage and get on to the roof of HMP Frankland, a Durham prison dubbed “Monster mansion” due to many of its inmates being convicted murderers, terrorists and sex offenders. A local photographer captured Outlaw sunbathing in his underpants as he negotiated with prison officers from the National Tactical Response Group. Some social media users may have recognised Outlaw from TikTok and YouTube, where he used to post protest raps and songs from his cell. View image in fullscreen Screengrab from Joe Outlaw’s YouTube channel. Photograph: YouTube It was a huge embarrassment for the prison service, particularly as Outlaw was on the e-list (escape list) at the time. He shed the yellow and blue jumpsuit that indicates a flight risk only when he breached the cage, prompting huge cheers from the prisoners below. It was not Outlaw’s first rooftop rodeo. An expert climber since his youth, when he escaped from numerous care homes, in April this year he managed to get on to the roof at HMP Manchester, better known as Strangeways, by sneaking off from the healthcare unit and crawling through reels of barbed wire. For 12 soggy hours he sat up there in the driving rain to highlight the plight of prisoners in Wales and England, like himself, who are stuck in jail after being given imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences with no automatic date for release. Designed to protect the public from serious offenders whose crimes did not merit a life sentence, these indeterminate sentences were abolished in 2012 after it became apparent that they were “unclear and inconsistent” and resulted in people languishing in jail for many years, often for quite minor crimes, and with no clear path for release. “FREE IPPZ”, Outlaw wrote on Strangeways’ roof in gloss paint that kept running in the rain. View image in fullscreen Joe Outlaw on the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Photograph: News Images/Alamy Outlaw, now 37, was given an IPP in 2011 after robbing his local takeaway with an imitation firearm while high on drugs. The IPP was imposed, he says, because he already had two firearms offences on his record – including one committed while a juvenile, when he fired a pellet gun in a public park. He knows his crime was serious. “I didn’t hurt him physically, but anyone pointing a gun at anyone is traumatising, and I don’t know what it’s done to [the takeaway worker’s] life. I’ve got to take responsibility for that, and I am sorry for that,” he told the Guardian in one of a series of letters. Outlaw – then going by the name Chris Hordosi, which he changed to Outlaw, his mother’s maiden name, while in prison – was given an IPP with an 18-year tariff, reduced to nine on appeal. Without the IPP element, he would have been eligible for automatic release after four and a half years. Yet 12 years later, he is still in prison, fighting against a system he thinks is rigged to make release all but impossible. He believes the lack of hope has killed other IPPs – 270 so far have died in prison, with 81 taking their own lives. Outlaw says he has tried to kill himself at least once, by setting fire to his cell – which ultimately resulted in an extra conviction for arson. He claims other IPPs have ended up committing murder in prison, figuring out they are basically in for life anyway. After his rooftop protest at Frankland, Outlaw was transferred to HMP Belmarsh, a Category A jail in London that holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in England and Wales. He claims that since 23 June he has been forced to live in “total isolation” on a special unit opened just for him. “I haven’t heard or seen another inmate in almost six months so far. This is not because I’m violent or a danger to anyone. In 13 years I’ve never assaulted a member of staff and I have only had one fight with an inmate [a paedophile in HMP Wakefield]. I have been totally isolated simply because I spoke out in protest against the ongoing illegal imprisonment of IPPs … and to silence my voice and activism,” he said. There is now near-unanimous agreement that IPPs are unfair, with the current justice secretary, Alex Chalk, calling them “a stain” on the justice system. As of 30 September, there were 2,921 IPP prisoners , 1,269 of whom have never been released, with the remaining 1,652 having been recalled to custody. A recent Independent Monitoring Board report on Belmarsh found it was holding four IPP prisoners, including Outlaw, telling ministers: “The Board considers it is inhumane to keep these men in prison for such lengthy periods.” The law is gone but they are still in jail: who will free Britain’s most wronged prisoners? | George Monbiot Read more Last month, Chalk announced reforms that would cut the time that released IPP prisoners serve on licence from 10 to three years. But it remains unclear whether the reforms will benefit Outlaw, who claims he has not been given any information about whether it will give him a pathway for release. He says he carried out his second rooftop protest at Frankland after suffering “horrid levels of abuse and neglect” there. The alternative was suicide, he said: “If I would have not taken that chance to do what I did there I would have ended up hanging myself, I swear to god.” He claims he hid strips of ripped-up bed sheets in his trainers, which he then used to tie himself to the exercise yard cage, while hanging upside down. He then managed to break the cage before he crawled through and on to the roof. “The most shocking thing was that I was in an e-list blue and yellow escape suit at the time, and just six weeks before, I had been on Manchester’s roof,” he said, describing it as “a new level of embarrassment for the Prison Service”, which “begs the question: what if this was a mass murderer or a millionaire drug dealer with a chopper?” Outlaw knows many people may read of his escapades and think: “Joey, no wonder you are not getting out.” But he insists that many far better behaved IPP prisoners are stuck. “Lads have been sweet as a nut, managed to dodge all the war zones, do all the bullshit courses and they still come up with some reason to keep them in,” he wrote. He claims he was originally told “all I had to do was keep my head down, behave and do my [rehabilitation] courses and I’d be back out in no time”. But in reality, he says, “every time lads would complete a course, a new one would be created and the goalposts moved again.” The Parole Board is inherently risk-averse when it comes to IPPs, he says. “They treat people that are in for fights or robbery like they are murderers.” Over 1,800 offenders to have indefinite jail sentences terminated, says MoJ Read more Prisons are corrupt, insists Outlaw. He claims to have watched drones deliver drugs to HMP Manchester every night, and “found myself just smoking weed, sniffing coke, taking Xanax – it was mental, everybody was just on a party mode constantly”. Officers turned a blind eye to rampant smartphone use, he claims, to the point that he started TikTok and YouTube channels to showcase his jailhouse songs, one of which, he claims, gathered more than 150,000 views in three days. He wants readers to put themselves in his shoes when viewing his protests. “What would you do when the people who are meant to be helping you are the ones who are abusing you, when no one around you cares or treats you with respect? There’s people who become your captors who are torturing you on a daily basis … How can you expect a person to change his ways for the better when treated with such disregard?” A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We abolished IPP sentences in 2012 and have already reduced the number of offenders serving them in prison by three-quarters. We have also taken decisive action to curtail IPP licence periods to give rehabilitated people the opportunity to move on with their lives. “Those still in custody are being helped to progress towards release through improved access to rehabilitation programmes and mental health support – but as a judge deemed them to be a high risk to the public the independent Parole Board must decide if they are safe to leave prison.” It should be impossible to escape from a high-security prison, doubly so for prisoners held on the segregation unit, who are allowed only to exercise in a caged yard. But on 21 June, the summer solstice and the hottest day of the year at that point, Joe Outlaw managed to break through the cage and get on to the roof of HMP Frankland, a Durham prison dubbed “Monster mansion” due to many of its inmates being convicted murderers, terrorists and sex offenders. A local photographer captured Outlaw sunbathing in his underpants as he negotiated with prison officers from the National Tactical Response Group. Some social media users may have recognised Outlaw from TikTok and YouTube, where he used to post protest raps and songs from his cell. View image in fullscreen Screengrab from Joe Outlaw’s YouTube channel. Photograph: YouTube It was a huge embarrassment for the prison service, particularly as Outlaw was on the e-list (escape list) at the time. He shed the yellow and blue jumpsuit that indicates a flight risk only when he breached the cage, prompting huge cheers from the prisoners below. It was not Outlaw’s first rooftop rodeo. An expert climber since his youth, when he escaped from numerous care homes, in April this year he managed to get on to the roof at HMP Manchester, better known as Strangeways, by sneaking off from the healthcare unit and crawling through reels of barbed wire. For 12 soggy hours he sat up there in the driving rain to highlight the plight of prisoners in Wales and England, like himself, who are stuck in jail after being given imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences with no automatic date for release. Designed to protect the public from serious offenders whose crimes did not merit a life sentence, these indeterminate sentences were abolished in 2012 after it became apparent that they were “unclear and inconsistent” and resulted in people languishing in jail for many years, often for quite minor crimes, and with no clear path for release. “FREE IPPZ”, Outlaw wrote on Strangeways’ roof in gloss paint that kept running in the rain. View image in fullscreen Joe Outlaw on the roof of Strangeways in Manchester. Photograph: News Images/Alamy Outlaw, now 37, was given an IPP in 2011 after robbing his local takeaway with an imitation firearm while high on drugs. The IPP was imposed, he says, because he already had two firearms offences on his record – including one committed while a juvenile, when he fired a pellet gun in a public park. He knows his crime was serious. “I didn’t hurt him physically, but anyone pointing a gun at anyone is traumatising, and I don’t know wha
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Fiction to look out for in 2024
Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson This article is more than 1 year old Fiction to look out for in 2024 This article is more than 1 year old The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special Nonfiction to look out for in 2024 T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media. Explore more on these topics Fiction 2024 culture preview Percival Everett David Nicholls Sarah Perry Claire Messud Miranda July Rachel Kushner features Share Reuse this content Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson This article is more than 1 year old Fiction to look out for in 2024 This article is more than 1 year old The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special Nonfiction to look out for in 2024 T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media. Explore more on these topics Fiction 2024 culture preview Percival Everett David Nicholls Sarah Perry Claire Messud Miranda July Rachel Kushner features Share Reuse this content Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson View image in fullscreen Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson This article is more than 1 year old Fiction to look out for in 2024 This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Fiction to look out for in 2024 This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Fiction to look out for in 2024 This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special Nonfiction to look out for in 2024 The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special Nonfiction to look out for in 2024 The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media. Explore more on these topics Fiction 2024 culture preview Percival Everett David Nicholls Sarah Perry Claire Messud Miranda July Rachel Kushner features Share Reuse this content T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media. Explore more on these topics Fiction 2024 culture preview Percival Everett David Nicholls Sarah Perry Claire Messud Miranda July Rachel Kushner features Share Reuse this content T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. T here’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature next month. In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago) is the first great lockdown novel (Nunez, of course, has pandemic form – Salvation City was about a flu epidemic). Beginning in the spring of 2020, The Vulnerables tells the story of an unlikely couple thrown together by the confines of Covid: an older writer and a young college dropout, united by their shared responsibility for a cantankerous parrot called Eureka. April brings yet another novel by the prolific Percival Everett. James (Mantle) – his 28th work of fiction in a career spanning 40 years – is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, fleeing slavery with young Huck. It’s a rambunctious, perspective-altering book, keeping the adventurous spirit of the original but full of contemporary resonances. Another generous novel with a journey at its centre is You Are Here (Sceptre) by David Nicholls. Marnie and Michael are stuck in the midlife doldrums until they meet on a 10-day hike through the Lakes and Dales. No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls, and while this is a more mature and cagoule-wearing novel than One Day or Sweet Sorrow , it delivers the same satisfying emotional punch. April also sees a new novel from the great Andrew O’Hagan. Caledonian Road (Faber) is the story of Campbell Flynn, a Scot teaching art history in London. When he meets a charismatic young student, Milo Mangasha, he’s struck at once by the “potential for things to get wayward”. It’s a barnstorming book, taking us deep into a London of wealth, crime, fashion and art. I danced a jig when Sarah Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape, May), landed on my doorstep. It’s glorious, doing what her books do best: intertwining a love story with reams of esoteric learning and big ideas. Enlightenment ranges boundlessly across space and time – from a touching portrait of the friendship between Grace and Thomas, co-worshippers at an Essex Baptist church, to the work of Maria Veduva, a 19th-century astronomer whose ghost haunts a local stately home. This is a beautiful, memorable novel. Also in May, there’s the great Claire Messud , with This Strange Eventful History (Fleet), the sweeping tale of a family – the Cassars – whose life takes them from second world war Paris to the US, Cuba, Australia and beyond over the decades that follow. It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose. Finally in May, there’s All Fours (Canongate) by screenwriter and director Miranda July. Usually, Hollywood novels are an embarrassment (or just very boring – thanks Mr Hanks). July, though, is a proper novelist and this is a great book about art, fame and reinvention. I loved Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse ; in Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus), out in June, she tells the story of two couples who live at the same address in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. It’s atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised. It has been five years since Kevin Barry’s last novel, Night Boat to Tangier . In his latest, The Heart in Winter (Canongate), also published in June, Barry moves to Montana in the 1890s. It’s an Irish western, by turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing. August sees the publication of the final novel in Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s unnamed trilogy (the previous book, Boulder , was shortlisted for 2023’s International Booker). Mammoth (And Other Stories), again translated by Julia Sanches, is about an unnamed young lesbian woman who yearns to be a mother. She carves a riotous path from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside, her story told in jagged sentences and eccentric metaphorical language. Benjamin Myers is another whose prolific output doesn’t diminish the quality of his writing: Rare Singles (Bloomsbury) returns Myers to his past as a music journalist, telling a warmly nostalgic tale of northern soul and unlikely friendship in Scarborough. The great but forgotten Bucky Bronco’s visit to the Yorkshire coast is handled with Myers’s customary humour and generosity of spirit. Next, thrillingly, there’s Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Jonathan Cape). Wyld has always been in a category of her own, but this is stranger, darker and more brilliant than anything she’s written before. Max is dead; we know this because the opening of the novel is narrated by his ghost. The book laces between south London and Australia, between Max, his girlfriend Hannah, and a wide circle of their friends and family, all of their stories hurtling towards the novel’s hallucinatory ending. This is a book that will stay with you for ever – both intimate and extraordinarily ambitious. Finally, in September, there’s my early pick for this year’s Booker: Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner . It’s a wild and brilliantly plotted piece of science fiction. This is the story of a secret agent, the redoubtable Sadie Smith, sent to infiltrate and disrupt a group of “anti-civvers” – eco-terrorists – in a France of the near future where industrial agriculture and sinister corporations dominate the landscape. Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré: smart, funny and compulsively readable. This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media. Explore more on these topics Fiction 2024 culture preview Percival Everett David Nicholls Sarah Perry Claire Messud Miranda July Rachel Kushner features Share Reuse this content Fiction 2024 culture preview Percival Everett David Nicholls Sarah Perry Claire Messud Miranda July Rachel Kushner features
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Kids Company charity founder Camila Batmanghelidjh dies aged 61
Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian This article is more than 1 year old Kids Company charity founder Camila Batmanghelidjh dies aged 61 This article is more than 1 year old Family announces death of campaigner known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Explore more on these topics Camila Batmanghelidjh Children Charities Kids Company news Share Reuse this content Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian This article is more than 1 year old Kids Company charity founder Camila Batmanghelidjh dies aged 61 This article is more than 1 year old Family announces death of campaigner known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Explore more on these topics Camila Batmanghelidjh Children Charities Kids Company news Share Reuse this content Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian This article is more than 1 year old Kids Company charity founder Camila Batmanghelidjh dies aged 61 This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Kids Company charity founder Camila Batmanghelidjh dies aged 61 This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Kids Company charity founder Camila Batmanghelidjh dies aged 61 This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Family announces death of campaigner known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children Family announces death of campaigner known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children Family announces death of campaigner known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Explore more on these topics Camila Batmanghelidjh Children Charities Kids Company news Share Reuse this content Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Explore more on these topics Camila Batmanghelidjh Children Charities Kids Company news Share Reuse this content Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Camila Batmanghelidjh, who created the legendary Kids Company children’s charity and became one of the UK’s best known and most powerful campaigners for disadvantaged youngsters, has died aged 61. Batmanghelidjh – known for her charisma, colourful attire and outspoken pursuit of social justice for children – had been ill for many months, though she rallied in recent weeks. She died peacefully on New Year’s Day, having celebrated her birthday with family and friends. In a statement, her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Camila Batmanghelidjh announce her passing. She died peacefully in her sleep the night of 1 January, following a birthday celebration with her family. “Camila dedicated her life to advocating for Britain’s most vulnerable children. She was the founder of two groundbreaking charities, Place2Be and Kids Company , which pioneered new therapeutic and clinical models to achieve a singular goal: ‘To see children and young people become safe and able to realise their potential.’” Alan Yentob, the broadcaster and former chair of Kids Company, who worked closely with Batmanghelidjh over many years, said: “All of us who worked with Camila are devastated by this news, as will be the thousands of children whose lives were transformed by her work. She will be sorely missed.” Born in Iran and educated in the UK, Batmanghelidjh rose to prominence after setting up Kids Company in south London in the late 1990s to provide support for youngsters scarred by poverty, abuse, trauma and gang violence, and who had fallen through the gaps of social services and NHS services. Her work, informed by her training in psychotherapy, caught the imagination of the public, politicians and celebrities, and she raised tens of millions of pounds from donors to fund the charity’s groundbreaking therapeutic work with tens of thousands of children. At the height of her celebrity in the mid-2000s she was given the nickname the “Angel of Peckham” by the media. She had the ear of Labour and Conservative prime ministers alike, attracted the support of pop stars and artists, and was known as an distinctive advocate for children’s rights and child protection reform. In 2015, Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees closed Kids Company after its growing financial troubles were exacerbated by a BBC report claiming sexual abuse had taken place at the charity. This triggered a public and media backlash. Police subsequently investigated the allegations, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. For months she was vilified in parts of the media, despite protesting her innocence, an extraordinary reversal of her earlier popularity with the press. The official receiver launched a high-profile and expensive attempt to ban her from holding senior roles in public life, finally culminating in a 10-week court case in 2021. The high court exonerated Batmanghelidjh, and rejected the claim that Kids Company had been mismanaged and charitable funds misspent. The judge praised her for the “enormous dedication she showed to vulnerable young people over many years” and her achievement in building a successful charity that did “incredible work”. Batmanghelidjh was outraged by a subsequent Charity Commission report into the collapse of Kids Company, which claimed the charity had been administratively mismanaged. A year ago she won permission to go to the high court to try to overturn the report but ill-health meant she could not progress her case. During the years after Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh carried on her work below the public radar from her small flat in West Hampstead, helping vulnerable children, advising schools, and staying in touch with many former staff and “graduates” of Kids Company. Her family’s statement added: “Working alongside her devoted colleagues and dedicated volunteers and donors, Camila changed the lives of tens of thousands of children and young people in London and Bristol otherwise neglected by a failing child protection system. She showed these children that they were worthy of love and support. “For all those around her, and especially for her family, she was endless source of inspiration, a fountain of wit, and a kaleidoscope of colour.” The Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis academy trust, which worked with Batmanghelidjh post-Kids Company, said she had been an inspiration, adding: “In the work she did with traumatised and disadvantaged kids at Oasis, the depth of her wisdom and her sheer love of children shone out.” Explore more on these topics Camila Batmanghelidjh Children Charities Kids Company news Share Reuse this content Camila Batmanghelidjh Children Charities Kids Company news
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‘You can be happy in prison’: climate protester reflects on punishment
Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images This article is more than 1 year old ‘You can be happy in prison’: climate protester reflects on punishment This article is more than 1 year old Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker received the longest sentences given to non-violent protesters in UK Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing. “And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.” “I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.” As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home; it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.” Explore more on these topics Just Stop Oil Climate crisis Prisons and probation news Share Reuse this content Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images This article is more than 1 year old ‘You can be happy in prison’: climate protester reflects on punishment This article is more than 1 year old Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker received the longest sentences given to non-violent protesters in UK Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing. “And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.” “I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.” As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home; it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.” Explore more on these topics Just Stop Oil Climate crisis Prisons and probation news Share Reuse this content Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images Morgan Trowland (3rd right) remembers his colleague Marcus Decker who is still in prison by joining friends as he leaves prison in December. Photograph: Martin Pope/Getty Images This article is more than 1 year old ‘You can be happy in prison’: climate protester reflects on punishment This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old ‘You can be happy in prison’: climate protester reflects on punishment This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old ‘You can be happy in prison’: climate protester reflects on punishment This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old This article is more than 1 year old Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker received the longest sentences given to non-violent protesters in UK Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker received the longest sentences given to non-violent protesters in UK Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker received the longest sentences given to non-violent protesters in UK Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing. “And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.” “I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.” As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home; it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.” Explore more on these topics Just Stop Oil Climate crisis Prisons and probation news Share Reuse this content Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing. “And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.” “I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.” As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home; it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.” Explore more on these topics Just Stop Oil Climate crisis Prisons and probation news Share Reuse this content Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing. “And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.” “I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.” As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home; it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.” Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately the reason I was climbing up the bridge, because I’ve met people, like in India, people who have really no resources to deal with climate breakdown, the kinds of people that are in large numbers now dying of climate-induced famine, disease, and that kind of thing. “And those horrific harms are really happening all the time. And people in Britain, we’re never having our day in court to face up to – look, this is what we’re doing to our neighbours in equatorial parts of the world.” “I see these kinds of direct actions as being a very rough justice, just to make everyone stop for a minute, to look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and especially to other very vulnerable people. Which otherwise we really just don’t.” As he readjusts to life on the outside, philosophical and ethical reflections aside, Trowland is happy to be a free man again: “It’s really nice to be home; it’s delightful to just be relaxing at home. I want to see if I can recover that very relaxing mind state that I had in prison. I want to see if I can get relaxed enough to write a poem in the outside world.” Last year, Morgan Trowland was one of two Just Stop Oil protesters sentenced to more than two and a half years in prison for scaling the Dartford crossing. The sentences handed down to Trowland and Marcus Decker are the longest sentences yet given to non-violent protesters in the UK. Now, after his release on licence last month, Trowland says the 13 months he spent behind bars hardly felt like punishment at all. In October 2022, Trowland and Decker were dropped off at night on the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, hopped over a barrier and shimmied up the thick steel cables that suspend it above the Thames estuary. For almost two days, they hung suspended in hammocks from the top of the bridge, displaying a giant “Just Stop Oil” banner. Police closed the crossing for 40 hours, causing huge delays for the hundreds of thousands of motorists who use it each day to travel between Essex and Kent. Passing sentence, Judge Shane Collery KC told them: “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” Decker remains behind bars and faces deportation to Germany on his release, but Trowland, originally from New Zealand, speaks fondly of his incarceration. “I’m personally not that bothered,” Trowland told the Guardian in a phone interview from his home in London. “It was a lot of quiet time to do lots of reading philosophy and poetry. “It’s not good, but personally I don’t think it’s very scary. It just seems really absurd. It feels really absurd to me because, like, that is supposed to scare us into accepting climate and ecological collapse, and accept living in a self-destructive societal system? It’s a nonsense.” Trowland served his sentence across three prisons. As soon as he and Decker were removed from the bridge, they were taken to Chelmsford prison, Essex, where many people are sent on remand. From there, Trowland spent a month in Pentonville, in London – the worst, he said, “because they don’t seem to have the resources or the staff to run any normal, reasonable regime, so they just lock everyone up most of the time”. “But it did have very good vegan food,” he added, speculating that it could be the result of its location in Islington.. After another spell in Chelmsford, Trowland finished the remainder of his sentence at Highpoint, a category C jail in Suffolk. That was much nicer, with “loads of grass and trees” and a gardens block, where Trowland was able to get a prison job. “It’s even got ponds and a wilderness corner and, in summer time, there’s this area that I called the dell with all these beautiful, tall wild flowers, and plants growing up in ponds, and foxgloves, and just all these beautiful things,” Trowland said. “So you see why it just felt really absurd? Like, do they know that environmentalist people like being in the countryside with trees and flowers?” It would be wrong to say prison had not changed Trowland. It was just that it was perhaps not in the way the authorities would have liked. A philosophy course he took at Highpoint gave him a renewed theoretical framework to justify his offending. He explained: “You form a society voluntarily because it’s for everyone’s collective welfare, and so that government that you form together should only be used to do things that are good for everyone. And if it’s doing something like cooking the climate and destroying the ecosystem, that is absolutely contrary to the purpose of forming a society. “It fits the scenario that John Locke laid out because in [Two] Treatises of Government, he lays out scenarios where it’s right and just to rebel against people that have misused government.” The relative deprivation of prison life also provided Trowland with a lesson in practical philosophy. “The biggest thing that hits you is possessions, and the superfluous nature of so many of them – after having hardly anything for a year, just some books and writing pads and diaries. I thought that was fine, that was a good amount of possessions actually – a few treasured books. “And then coming back to an apartment and going and getting stuff of mine from storage, it overwhelms on an emotional level, and on a philosophical level. What is all this for? Oh my God, why? Why spend life managing all these things? It all just seems utterly meaningless, and really overwhelming.” But perhaps Trowland’s most surprising lesson from life behind bars was about happiness. “It was quite easy to be happy in prison, because you can always come up with some mental pursuits … And that felt really good just because, you’re sent there to be punished, right? It’s supposed to be bad, you’re supposed to feel miserable, downcast all the time … So that was a good lesson, that you can be really happy with just some books of poetry and just going to a garden each day.” He does have regrets, not least about the people who were affected by the disruption his protest caused. His trial heard how small businesses lost thousands of pounds in revenue, sick patients missed hospital appointments; a witness at his trial who missed his friend’s funeral refused a note of apology Trowland wrote from the dock. The knowledge of those effects had been his real punishment, Trowland said. “What it raised for me is that that is exactly the kind of process that we don’t do collectively as British people, [which] is face up to the consequences of our actions on people elsewhere,” he said. “And that’s ultimately th
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