Michael Crowley

Michael Crowley is a published playwright and poet who has worked extensively with people in custody. He has written short fiction as well as for the stage, BBC radio and short film. He teaches creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University and was writer in residence at HM YOI Lancaster Farms between 2007 and 2013. He previously worked in youth justice as a restorative justice coordinator. He is the author of Behind the Lines: creative writing with offenders and people at risk (Waterside Press, 2012) and in 2013 and short listed for a Butler Trust Award for services to criminal justice in regard to his writing work with prisoners.

Crowley has run reading groups for young prisoners with a range of reading ability and had undertaken training from the Shannon Trust. The purpose of his reading and writing work with offenders has always been about raising moral questions – a contribution towards rehabilitation.

Crowley has a detailed knowledge of the penal settlement in Australia having researched it for the last eighteen months. He is currently writing a collection of poetry, First Fleet, in the voices of convicts, marines and aboriginal people. At Lancaster Farms he worked with a group of prisoners for six weeks on Our Country's Good - the celebrated stage play about the penal settlement and he knows that this is a topic that prisoners find of great interest.