A few years ago, up-and-coming writer and poet Connor Allen sat down with young offenders at a Welsh prison, running creative writing workshops with them and teaching them to look beyond the realms of a jail cell. It was an experience that hit home as he knew better than anyone that he could have ended up there as an inmate himself.
Having grown up confused about his own identity as a mixed-race boy on a Newport council estate, and with his father absent from his life, he knew what it felt like to feel worthless and unloved. On the receiving end of racist comments, but not knowing what they meant or how to process them, his childhood was one marked largely by frustration, which came to a head in a devastating way.
As a teenager, a row with his mum ended with him violently assaulting her and winding up in court facing a lengthy prison stretch. But having been given a second chance, he has turned his life around, becoming Wales' second ever Children Laureate and writing a theatre production based on his experiences which is about to launch at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff.
