The prizes awarded yesterday to the authors honoured by a new writing competition would not cover the cost of the invitation card for other Hay bashes.

The winner gets a £20 phone card, the runners up £5 cards, the most precious rewards the organisers could think of.

The judges included thriller writer Ian Rankin, and Erwin James, the author of elegant columns for the Guardian on prison life and now the joys and terrors of coping with release.

Clive Hopwood, of the Writers in Prison organisation, joint organisers of the competition, explained: "In the best tradition of the Oscars, most of our winners can't be with us today."

Alan, the winner, certainly couldn't, and isn't likely to be active on the literary circuit for at least the next six years.

"He said to me this morning he wasn't even going to ask if he could come," said Paul Tidball, the governor of Cardiff prison, "but he is tremendously pleased and proud."

There is more pain in the entries than in a shelf full of thrillers: the pieces tell of the other victims of crime, the shattered families, the wives left with puzzled, desolate or angry children, the guilt-stricken or mortified parents.

Alan, a convicted drug courier, had never written anything before the prison's writer in residence, Bridget Keehan, started a magazine last winter. The Victorian prison, with 754 inmates including 96 lifers, also has a job centre, a hair salon, and trains inmates for NVQs.

His winning entry records the impact on a small boy's life of his father's arrest and imprisonment on drug offences. Alan is now planning to write a book.

Action for Prisoners Families estimates that at least 175,000 families each year contribute a member to Britain's European record prison population.