As the winners of the Penguin/Orange book club of the year, their prize should have been a weekend in Edinburgh. Just one problem: the members of the High Down reading group are in prison.

The article is from the author, Nick Hornby, whose visit to the prison book club was arrived at to be the alternative prize.

The High Down prison reading group has been in existence for four years, and in that time members have read Michel Houllebecq and Razor Smith, Adam Thirlwell and the Guardian’s own Erwin James, Patrick Suskind and Alice Sebold. And though some of those names suggest that a whole metropolitan dinner party has been arrested for some heinous middle-class crime – say, nanny-poaching – High Down is a Category B prison (Category B prisoners are defined as those “for whom escape must be made very difficult”, a phrase which seems to invite Category C and D prisoners to show their ingenuity).

For those of us who still believe that books add value and meaning to a life, then, a prison reading group is surely the ultimate examination of that belief: these are lives that could use as much added value as they can find.

The discussion as related by Hornby is insightful and educating — sometimes by what’s left out as much as what’s discussed.

“How about this?” said one of the men when the organisers of the prize asked for a quote to illustrate the prisoners’ delight. “We could have had a weekend of sex and drugs in Edinburgh. But instead we decided to talk about suicide with Nick Hornby.”