Had he listened to his fellow inmates in Long Kesh, Ronan Bennett would not have scooped the Irish novel of the year award last week. A terrified secondary-school pupil when he entered the notorious prison in 1974, the 18-year-old was told by republican elders that the guys who mattered threw bombs. Writing, the young activist was warned, was “bourgeois nonsense”.

Bennett, who was wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer during a botched armed robbery, took the advice to heart.

He stopped reading novels for 10 years, convinced by his fellow political prisoners that writers were “fairly miserable pieces of work”. He couldn’t give up entirely, though, and to pass the time he made a study of “wars of liberation” around the world.

The Maze made lasting impressions on Bennett, a soft-spoken son of a Catholic mother and Protestant father who was born in Oxford in 1956. He was raised in west Belfast and first became politically active as a student at St Mary’s Christian Brothers school on the Lower Falls, Gerry Adams’s alma mater.

Like Adams, Bennett’s life has been shaped by the Northern Ireland conflict. His teenage years, scarred by seeing neighbours and school friends killed, came to a climax when he was arrested, with three others, for the murder of William Elliott.

Elliott, an RUC officer, was murdered while trying to stop a robbery at Rathcoole, near Belfast. Bennett was convicted by a non-jury Diplock court and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent 18 months in Long Kesh before his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Behind bars, Bennett’s intellect impressed the republican leadership. “He was very serious and disciplined,” said a former internee. “He was no partygoer, not like some of us. He was also hilariously funny and, unlike a lot who came out, he has no ego.”

Most internees emerged from Long Kesh with a chip on their shoulder, but Bennett says that, apart from the cold and brutality, he enjoyed his time spent alongside republican stalwarts such as Ta Power, Jimmy Brown and Gerry Steenson. His fellow jailbirds would later inspire his debut novel.

“The place itself was very bleak,” he said. “There was an atmosphere of great brutality but, at the same time, there was a tremendous sense of solidarity. You go in a very frightened kid but, instead of being brutalised by prisoners, you discover that you know most of them from your street or school. Often it was a family reunion. Looking back, I haven’t regretted that experience at all.”

Far from regretting it, Bennett — whose work has been compared to that of the late American playwright Arthur Miller — has carved a prolific literary career out of his arrests, imprisonments, trials and uncanny ability to “beat the rap”. He has only one conviction, having been charged with escaping from custody after a failed attempt to impersonate another prisoner who was about to be released. He walked 10 yards before his effort was thwarted.

After being released from Long Kesh, Bennett relocated to England. In 1978 he began his second term in prison, spending 20 months on remand in Brixton after police raided the Bayswater flat that the 23-year-old shared with his girlfriend and found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, wigs, false moustaches, balaclavas, false documents and passports. Bennett was accused of leading a terrorist gang and charged with the now legendary offence of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown”.

Dubbed the anarchist’s trial, the crimes unknown case developed into a cause célèbre after a 14-week hearing in which Bennett defended himself. The self-trained advocate, who was accused by one lawyer of “attempting to overthrow society”, was acquitted of possessing a .22 rifle, sodium chlorate — an explosive substance — and handling stolen goods.

His trial over, Bennett enrolled at King’s College, London, where he completed a doctorate in crime and law enforcement in the 17th century.His passion for history almost led to a career in teaching but Bennett was also attracted to politics. He was never far from controversy. In 1987 the security forces protested when Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing Labour MP, appointed Bennett as his researcher, granting him a pass to the House of Commons. Bennett was banned from the Houses of Parliament by the Speaker.

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