"I exploded into my first workshop. I was a volatile child and I had just left the care system. The world was afire with homophobia and youth unemployment. Contact became the place where I could test out my politics and learn to express them through Poetry and Theatre. It threw me a lifeline, and at the same time taught me how to be a collaborator. I wrote my first play aged 17. It took a while longer to become a professional artist, but when I did, I kept on detonating in Contact and many other theatres across the UK and around the world. Most of all though Contact was the first place I could just be Me."