Meet Denise
Denise Harrison is a Dorset-based writer, filmmaker, and recovery advocate. She is the author of Finding Rat Park A Handbook for Recovery and Sparks in the Dark The Prison Project, and her work sits at the intersection of addiction, homelessness, trauma, and hope. Drawing from lived experience, Denise creates tools, stories, and spaces that help people who have long been pushed to the margins begin to find their way back to themselves.
There are people who speak loudly about change and then there are people like Denise Harrison, whose presence is steady, observant, and quietly unshakeable. She is not someone who rushes to the front of the room. More often, she’s listening. Watching. Reading what isn’t being said. And then, when it matters most, she speaks with a clarity that comes from having walked through the fire herself.
Denise has spent much of her life alongside people in turmoil: those living with addiction, homelessness, trauma, and loss. She understands chaos not as an abstract concept, but as a place she once lived. And it’s from that place that her work now grows not to rescue, not to preach, but to remind people that there is still a way through.
A Childhood on the Outside Looking In
Denise’s sense of being different arrived early. Her father died when she was six, an absence that fractured the family’s sense of stability. Her mother suffered a breakdown not long after, and money was scarce. Grief, confusion, and emotional distance became part of the landscape of her childhood.
She learned quickly that she didn’t quite fit where she was supposed to. While other children found safety in groups, Denise found it in solitude. She spent long stretches alone, learning to live inside her own thoughts. What could have hardened her instead sharpened her awareness. She became observant, deeply empathic, attuned to the emotional weather of a room.
That ability never left her. Today, it allows her to connect with people across vast social divides from those sleeping in doorways to CEOs and public figures. It’s not confidence that fuels that connection. It’s recognition.
Losing Everything and Finding the Truth
In 2014, Denise’s life collapsed. She lost her relationship, her home, her pets, and nearly all her belongings. The grief was overwhelming. Alcohol became a way to disappear from the pain until it consumed her entirely.
She describes that period without romanticism. Addiction stripped her of herself. She experienced a breakdown, was hospitalised, and entered detox and rehab.. When treatment ended, she moved into a homeless hostel carrying little more than survival and the faintest instinct to keep going.
That was where the writing began.
What started as anonymous posts shared quietly online slowly became a lifeline first for herself, then for others. Over time, those fragments grew into Finding Rat Park, a recovery handbook written not from theory, but from lived reality. It was designed for people with little or no support, those trying to make sense of addiction while standing knee-deep in it.
Recovery, she learned, is not about returning to who you were. It’s about becoming someone new shaped by what you’ve survived.
The Prison Walls That Changed Everything
Finding Rat Park was originally written for people living in hostels and halfway houses. Denise never imagined where it would lead next.
When she was invited to teach the material inside a prison, she entered a world she had only encountered through headlines and screens. What she found there was something else entirely men hungry for understanding, honesty, and connection. Inside those walls, a community formed. Trust grew. Stories were shared.
The experience reshaped her not just as a practitioner, but as a person. It became the foundation for Sparks in the Dark, a project inspired by the men she met and the lives unfolding behind locked doors.
Denise doesn’t frame this work as heroic. She frames it as human. As meeting people where they are and staying long enough for something real to happen.
Work That Comes From the Inside Out
Today, Denise’s work spans books, films, workshops, and live performance all grounded in the same intention: to help people believe that change is possible, even when everything feels lost.
Her films exploring homelessness and mental health have won awards and been screened internationally. Her books are used by outreach teams, refuges, hostels, and prisons across the UK. Her workshops create space for people who have spent most of their lives believing they would never amount to anything and invite them to imagine otherwise.
She remains, by her own admission, mostly a hermit. Writing and creating in solitude is how she stays grounded. But when she steps forward, she does so with purpose. As she puts it:
“I’m not a ‘shouty’ person. I don’t share much of what I do with the world… but when I’m passionate about something, or I’m trying to create change, believe me I can roar and when I do, people listen.”
What Success Really Means
For Denise, success has never been about recognition though there has been plenty of it. Film awards. Published books. International leadership programs. A growing body of work that reaches places most people never see.
What matters more is quieter.
“Success for me is knowing that I make a difference,” she says. “When I have a bad day, I think about my books and my films and the lives that have been touched… and I remember who I am today.”
That sense of grounding guides how she lives now. She donates to causes she believes in. She shows up for her friends with fierce loyalty. She protects her mental and physical health with the same seriousness she brings to her work.
Pain, for her, has not disappeared. It has been transformed.
Still Writing Toward the Light
Looking ahead, Denise’s vision is expansive but rooted. She plans to continue the Sparks in the Dark series, finish developing the Finding Rat Park recovery workshops into a portable blueprint, and bring her one-woman play Pandora to the stage a project born from years of lived insight and creative courage.
She surrounds herself with people who share her values: quiet, passionate change-makers who understand that impact doesn’t require noise only integrity.
And if there is a guiding belief that runs through all of her work, it’s this:
Never underestimate the impact of your words. Or your presence. Or your survival.
Denise Harrison is not interested in being seen as extraordinary. She is interested in being useful — in standing beside others when hope feels thin, and calmly reminding them that there is, still, a way through the dark.
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