The book title award of the year must certainly go to the prisoners on the €1 landing of Portlaoise prison who last week launched a collection of their own writings.
The title, Prose and Cons, was launched last Monday evening at the Dunamaise Theatre and Centre for Arts in Portlaoise by one of Kerry's finest, the poet, scholar and gentleman, Prof Brendan Kennelly.
Brendan is not a recent convert to helping prisoners get the best out of their time inside. For many years, he has been going to prisons in the State, encouraging inmates to write. It was fitting then, that one of the poems in Prose and Cons is dedicated to him and is about the impact Brendan made on one of the contributors when he visited Mountjoy Prison in Dublin a decade ago.
He read extracts from the book to an audience which included one of the prisoners, who had been paroled for the few hours of the publication party.
Jane Meally, who teaches English and creative writing to the prisoners in Portlaoise, said that they took on the work of compiling and editing the book themselves.
"In all, there are 17 contributors and only one of those, the former Laois writer-in-residence, Rita Kelly, is an outsider," she said.
She said Rita and another former writer-in-residence in Laois, Patrick Galvin, had been a great help to the prison's education department over the years.
Some of the prisoners who contributed to the book were long-term inmates and others were not, she said. Some attended creative writing classes and others did not.
Some of the prisoners had chosen to write under their own names and others had used pennames or had contributed to the book anonymously.
"It was entirely a matter of choice for the prisoners whether or not they took part, but a lot of them did and the book they produced is a good one," she said.
"There is some very good prose and verse in the book, and what is really interesting is that the prisoners want the proceeds to go to Sister Caoimhin Ni Ullachain, of the Matt Talbot Community Trust.".
This trust is a non-residential community founded to work in solidarity with young disadvantaged adults, mostly those returning to the community from prison, addiction therapy or psychiatric care. The book will be available after Christmas in bookshops nation-wide.