The cell was maybe eight feet by six and it contained nothing, not even a mattress, just a cement floor that stank of urine, four graffiti-daubed walls, and some cockroaches. This was where Jack Mapanje found himself; squatting in hell's jailhouse, five miles from the Zomba township in his native Malawi, just hours after he had been buzzing about the university as normal. It was 1987 and Mapanje's crime had been to write some poetry - poetry the dictator, Dr Hastings Banda, considered to be "rude".

Malawi in the 1980s was a fear-stalked place, a tropical nightmare of shotgun diplomacy, and in the cramped and stinking cell, Mapanje feared the worst. "What dictators do," he says, "is they abduct you and wait for the world to shout. If the world doesn't shout, they kill you."

But a lucky twist of fate spun out from Malawi and reached half-way around the world, to Kiltegan in Co Wicklow, and the shout went up. "This is how my life was saved," says Mapanje. "My friend, an Irish priest called Patrick O'Malley from Mayo, heard I'd been arrested and rushed to my house. He got there just in time to see me being driven away in the back of a van." The priest knew he had to raise the alarm but with every phone tapped, he needed a code to avoid incriminating himself. So he phoned Father Leo Morahan at St Patrick's Seminary in Kiltegan and broke the news in Irish.

"I have absolutely no doubt the Irish language was vital in saving my life," says the poet. "The priest in Ireland rang my friends in York and they contacted the BBC. The news went out on the World Service in Africa the next day and I was alive."

Right now, Mapanje is all easy smiles and ready laughs. He's cosily cloistered at UCC, where he was recently appointed writer-in-residence, and although a vicious swirl of April rain is gossiping on the window-pane, his spirits seem high. "But I was writing a rude poem this morning," he says, "and that may have been connected with the weather."

The cupla focail may have saved his life but they didn't end the nightmare. He spent three years, seven months and 16 days in jail and though he managed to swing a move from the horror of the eight by six cell, prison life was pretty rough. "The most horrific thing was that I had not been charged or tried, so I didn't know how long I was going to be there. People have been in that jail for 25 years, 28 years . . .

"Horrible things begin to happen to the mind. You think you're going bonkers and you start to accuse yourself of things you may have done. You think, maybe it was the day I did that, or said this: you look to blame yourself for where you have ended up."

What he had actually done was publish a book of poems called Of Chameleons And Gods, a collection from the 1970s and early 1980s, some of it critical of the Banda regime. The criticism was masked, and by necessity, veiled but its intent still slipped through.

"Yes, some of my poems were political but they were very oblique and many others I had thrown away out of fear. Each poem had two and sometimes three levels of interpretation, just in case I might be put before a court."

He should have been so lucky. Throughout his time in jail, Mapanje was never told why he was being held, or for how long, or whether he would be killed. "Twice a year, in January and August, they would come in the middle of the night and take six men away to be hung. They'd burst in with all this fanfare and there'd be a death song sung; it was so eerie there in the middle of the night. We'd all stand there, shivering and shaking, shitting ourselves, because you never knew if your name would be called. It could be you and if your name was called, you'd be chained, clamped and thrown into the back of a truck and taken to Zomba and hung."

The call never came and Mapanje went to work in the kitchens, where the cuisine consisted of rotten vegetables, cabbages alive with maggots, beans with added weevils. Each week, someone would drop with cholera, or dysentery, or one of the other big, bad, biblical diseases bred by tortuous incarceration. In the cells in summer, the temperature would soar past 100 degrees and the stink was beyond words.

"I managed to write about 25 poems in prison, but I wrote them in my head: I had to retain them there. Sometimes, you'd have a little lead from a pencil and you'd hide this in a kink in your hair and write on toilet paper but this had to be kept for messages to the outside, to the people campaigning for me."

So the poetry was a luxury but a necessary one. "When I was released, only the titles came back initially, so I had to reconstruct them and I think I've recovered 15 of the 25. The poetry was crucial to my survival, it gave definition to my life in there. When you don't know what to do, when you don't know what's going to happen to you, all you can do is make writing from these feelings: you make poetry, you turn the cockroaches into metaphors."

One day, out of the blue, Mapanje was driven to a police HQ and told he was being released. The following year, Banda was voted out of office. Mapanje found out that among those who had originally campaigned for his imprisonment was the principal of the university where he had worked.

Reunited with his wife and family, he stayed in Malawi for a couple of years but was told by intelligence agents that his life was still in danger. The family moved to York and last year, after a mess of bureaucracy, they were granted UK citizenship. Mapanje is now writing a memoir of his prison years, and he continues his work in linguistics and as a literary theorist. The poetry continues too and Mapanje's reputation is growing. Last year, he published Skip- ping Without Ropes, a collection that contains some of his prison work.

"Jail sharpened my writing, I think, and it certainly changed its direction. My work had always been about suffering but it was a subject I didn't truly know about until I was in prison. In a way, I realised how right I had been. It sounds strange, I suppose, but in this way prison was a kind of fulfilment."

He's not going back to Malawi any time soon. "All I can do is teach and the only place I would want to teach in Malawi is the university but that principal is still there. It mightn't be such a good idea. . ."

Awkward moments in the canteen, I suggest. "Absolutely! You'd be worrying about what he'd put in your tea."

Living abroad now, and travelling some, the poetry is still evolving. "I'm an international citizen, so now I write globally. My poetry is less parochial and in many ways, that may mean it loses flavour. If you pick a woman in your village and write about her plight, that may be better than writing about the general plight of a nation. There is an originality, I think, in the parochial."

Jack Mapanje reads from his work in Lecture Theatre 3 of the Boole Library, UCC, tonight at 8 o'clock.