- Author of Memoir, Fiction and Narrative Nonfiction
- Consultancy on Prison & Mental Healthcare Design
- Creative Writing Teaching & Mentoring
Hello!
I’m Yvonne Jewkes.
In October 2025 I left my academic career (twenty years a criminology professor) to focus on the things I enjoy more – writing books, teaching creative writing, mentoring, and helping to design custodial and mental health facilities.
I have recently published two books that epitomise the new directions my life is taking:
An Architecture of Hope
A memoir that interweaves narratives from my professional and personal lives. An Architecture of Hope: Reimagining the Prison, Restoring a House, Rebuilding Myself was Scribe Publications’ nonfiction title of the year. An extract was published as a ‘Long Read’ in The Guardian and was also a feature story in the FT Weekend.
Handbook of Prison Design
With colleagues in the UK and USA, I published an edited collection The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design which brings together expertise from around the world and from a range of disciplinary perspectives to address a key question facing prison policymakers, architects and designers – what kind of carceral environments foster wellbeing, and deliver positive outcomes and a rehabilitative, therapeutic environment?
Design Consultant
My work as an advisor to prison architects and construction companies has had considerable policy impacts in several countries, encouraging design professionals to see prisons and prisoners through a rehabilitation lens as opposed to one focused solely on security and control.
My research has been instrumental in fundamentally changing the thinking of the personnel I’ve worked with in prison services, correction services and ministries of justice, re-framing their long-term strategic planning decisions and thinking differently about people in prison. One small but significant influence I’ve had is in the design of cell windows. Prisons in England and Wales no longer have bars on the windows for the very first time in this country’s penal history. I also advise on design in the mental health sector. Read more about my work in this area by clicking the link at the top.
Creative Writing Tutor
I teach creative writing at retreats and workshops in the UK and Norway, with my friend Andy West, and also offer mentoring to aspiring writers. If you have a yearning to write your memoir or someone else’s life story, or you think you have a novel in you, I’d love to see you at one of our writing events. Our website www.freedomtowrite.co.uk has all the details.
Andy and I teach life writing to university academics too (on the theme ‘all writing is creative writing’), and we have been Writers-in-Residence at two high-security prisons, HMP Grendon and HMP Rye Hill. I have also run writing classes at HMP Lincoln and HMP Liverpool. I live and work in Bath.
In the Media
Financial Times Weekend
The Guardian
