Cage Eleven : Prison Writings from Long Kesh

Gerry Adams wrote Cage Eleven from the inside, as a prisoner at Long Kesh in the 1970s. The book gathers his short sketches of prison life, which were taken out of the prison and printed under a pseudonym in the Belfast paper Republican News. It is a book for readers interested in the history of Long Kesh and in the early writing of a future Sinn Féin leader.

Sources record that Adams was interned without trial in 1972 on the prison ship Maidstone, arrested again in 1973 and held at Long Kesh until 1977. After a conviction for attempting to escape, he was moved to Cage 11, where sentenced prisoners were kept. An Irish News feature from 2021 recalls that Cage 11 men, refused hurling sticks, carved their own hurleys from boxwood.

According to The Irish Times, Adams wrote more than 40 of these pieces between 1975 and 1977 under the pen name Brownie. In a 2015 article for that paper, Thomas Dolan argued that they set out a practical republicanism concerned with the social and economic needs of nationalist areas, and showed Adams doubting hunger strikes as a tactic at the time. Reviewing the American edition in the Washington Post Book World in 1997, H. Bruce Franklin of Rutgers University found the twenty six sketches often light and humorous, with Adams a modest minor figure rather than a political leader.

This updated paperback edition of Cage Eleven adds a new introduction and sketches drawn in the cage by fellow prisoner Danny Devenny. Gerry Adams was born in West Belfast in 1948, the eldest of ten children, was president of Sinn Féin and a TD for Louth, and has been a published writer since 1982.