'Koestler-Wilde' by Sean Bw Parker
Not long after arriving in prison in 2018, I started noticing posters and leaflets for the Koestler Awards. I knew of the (20th century Hungarian) writer Arthur Koestler, but didn't know he had bequeathed an annual awards for the incarcerated, due to his own experiences as a political prisoner during the inter-war years. My mother confirmed during our occasional phone chats that she and my father had idolised Koestler during the 1960s and 70s, and sent me in a copy of one of his more well known books The Ghost In The Machine (somehow swerving Chris Grayling's arbitrary, 'some-prisons' book ban). It took me weeks if not months of pacing up and down my cell while reading it - a good way to keep the blood circulation to the brain going - but finish it I eventually did.
Soon the newly renamed Koestler Arts asked for artistic representations of a historical figure, to keep their captive audience busy; so I ended up morphing Koester, Oscar Wilde and a character from my own books, Anthony H. Wolfstadt - a dissolute expat in Istanbul, struggling with the progressive revolution in the West. So was born 'Koestler-Wilde' – conceived at Dartmoor, and realised at Leyhill Open prison.
Sean Bw Parker
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