A novel escape: meet the murderer who's just published a dazzling debut

“When f***ed-up people end up inside they can be whoever they want,” writes Curtis Dawkins at the start of a story titled ‘Engulfed’.

“A crackhead becomes a former high-class pimp. A tax evader was a master forger and poker champ.”

And a lumberyard sales man becomes a published author. Only, the last one is true. Dawkins, whose debut collection The Graybar Hotel is published by Canongate this week, is serving life at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan. He was sent down in 2005 for felony murder after killing a man during a burglary.  Sentenced without parole, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

But in a previous life – before drug and alcohol addiction remapped his destiny – Dawkins had studied creative writing, earning an MFA at Western Michigan University. Locked up, lonely and despairing, he soon found himself returning to a long-dormant passion.

“After county jail, when I had finally gotten to prison, I had not written any fiction for at least three years," he explains to me during a lengthy email conversation. "I’d been working in sales.

“In that new, huge and disorienting world of bars and slamming doors, I grasped at the only familiar thing I could fine.”

The grity, gripping and grimly comic stories in The Graybar Hotel give form and content to inmates lives that, on the surface, are defined by loneliness, boredom, violence and alienation. In ‘A Human Number’, a man makes collect calls just to hear voices from the outside world. ‘The Boy Who Dreamed Too Much’ explores the emotional dynamics of life in a shared cell.  ‘Swans’ looks back on high-school days and a youth spent hankering after love and cheap weed.

“The men I live among are almost entirely uneducated and poor,” says Dawkins. “Their stories have traditionally been told by people who use them as props to make a buck. Violence sells. Violence and bad behaviour are certainly part of life here, but more common is simply daily life.

“Nothing will ever change in our system until the image of the rabid, tattooed animal is replaced by one that's real. Prisoners are partly to blame for this, playing up that image because we often don't know the difference between good and bad attention. Even the handful of past prison books by inmates focus on surface level behaviour.

“It is so much easier to lock someone up for life by focusing on the negative. But listen to his phone call to his grandmother, his kids, his mom. Watch him on a visit with his girlfriend, and it becomes much harder to dismiss him as a horrible human being unworthy of another chance.”

Dawkins stories draw the reader in with the sweep of their humanity and empathy, but they pull no punches. Prison life is, much of the time, a tedious round of banter, daytime television, exercising in the gym, trading cigarettes and other sundry items, hunting for a tote of marijuana. And – to one degree or another – there’s always tension, between inmates, with the system, with guards, with one’s own divided self.

Curtis Dawkins

Writing, says Dawkins, is his “survival strategy.” Inmates are routinely moved around Michigan’s forty prisons. He’s at his fourth address in twelve years. The constant upheaval, combined with the dim prospects for release, and his missing his partner – also a writer – and children, leads inevitably to deep lows in any prisoner’s mood.

“Those cells will kill a person. Generally, only my body is here. After nearly thirteen years behind bars, I've become a professional mental escapee.”

“[Writing] took me out of my very present misery. That, and constant reading. I don't think I would have made it otherwise. Thinking about the further harm my suicide would do to my kids was the final failsafe, but words make daily life decent.”

Dawkins firmly believes that one day he’ll be released. Meanwhile, he is not short of material for future works of fiction.

“The way men do their time is fascinating to me. Isn't that the existential essence of all writing? What do we do from cradle to grave? How do we fill our time? I think prison is interesting to many people because everyone in the world is doing time, and here, it is time distilled.

“So, when a guy spends his days in jail making random collect calls, it's just the variation of ‘lonely person trying to feel less alone’ story. It's universal. It's J. A. Prufrock wanting to connect with his mermaids.

“You'd have to be blind not to see the artistic, story-telling value of things I see every day. Prison sucks, but for a writer, is there a place on earth more fertile?”

The Graybar Hotel is published by Canongate. Visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514 to order your copy.