Spotlight on Scout Tzofiya Bolton's 'The Mad Art of Doing Time'
- Aaron Kent
- Sep 25
- 2 min read
Scout Tzofiya Bolton’s The Mad Art of Doing Time (released 2025) is a striking work that blurs the boundaries between memoir, poetry, and testimony. Written in the aftermath of a manic and psychotic episode that led to Bolton’s incarceration, the collection confronts the realities of psychiatric misdiagnosis, prison life, faith, and survival with searing candour and inventive lyricism.
Structured in three acts (Basic, Standard, and Enhanced) and interspersed with the recurring 'Dear Richter' prose-poems, the book offers a multiverse of prison experiences: cellmates’ voices, fragments of court reports, psalms, and surreal meditations on love, faith, and madness. It is a testament both to the failures of systems and to the resilience of a writer determined to make art from confinement.
Here are two short excerpts that capture Bolton’s unique voice:
From 'Inside Voice'
[...] Every day, I lose
a boundary, I crush them down and pour
one to the ground for my friends. Every
thing I say and do has an asterisk floating
above it - the footnote in the hearts of my
loved ones implies a sorry they never get
to hear in plain.
From 'The Loneliest Whale in the World'
'[...] Before coming here I read a lot about
the 52-hertz whale, it calls at a low G# in the sea
and the other whales don’t know how to hear it.'
'[...] Every day in custody
I wake up a little more anchored and sane,
what a strange place, what a fucked up day;
I ring the call bell, but nobody hears.'
The Mad Art of Doing Time is a devastating, witty and necessary book that sheds light on the intersections of mental illness, incarceration and identity. It continues the bold, unflinching work Bolton began with A Terrific Uproar (Released 2022), cementing them as one of the most urgent poetic voices writing today.
About Scout Tzofiya Bolton:
Scout Tzofiya Bolton is a poet, activist, radio producer and the author of The Mad Art of Doing Time. While serving a sentence at HMP Styal in 2023, they worked for National Prison Radio, discovering a vocation in broadcasting that led to them presenting the Rock Show on National Prison Radio.
Their voice quickly gained recognition. In 2025, they won two Gold awards at the prestigious Audio and Radio Industry Awards (ARIAS): Best New Presenter and Best Creative or Technical Innovation for their stunning BBC Radio 4 documentary The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag. That same production earned them and the Prison Radio Association further acclaim at the New York Festivals, winning Gold for Best Use of Sound and Silver in the Health/Medical Documentary category.
