by Behrouz Boochani, Translated by Omid Tofighian
Anansi International
6/4/2019, paperback
SKU: 9781487006839
In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since.
This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi.
It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait of five years of incarceration and exile.
Winner of the Victorian Premier's Prize for Literature, Australia's richest literary prize, No Friend But the Mountains is an extraordinary account -- one that is disturbingly representative of the experience of the many stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.
Reviews:
"Not for the faint-hearted, it's a powerful, devastating insight into a situation that's so often seen through a political -- not personal -- lens." -- GQ Australia
"In the absence of images, turn to this book to fathom what we have done, what we continue to do. It is, put simply, the most extraordinary and important book I have ever read." -- Good Reading Magazine
About the Author:
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate, and filmmaker. His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Premier's Prize for Literature, Australia's richest literary prize, and the Victoria Premier's Prize for Nonfiction. Boochani was a writer for the Kurdish-language magazine Werya; is an Honorary Member of PEN International; was the winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya Award for journalism; and he is non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney. He publishes regularly with the Guardian, and his writing also features in the Saturday Paper, HuffPost, New Matilda, the Financial Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh's play Manus. He graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; and he holds a Master's degree in political science, political geography, and geopolitics.
Omid Tofighian is a translator, lecturer, researcher, and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, rhetoric, religion, popular culture, transnationalism, displacement, and discrimination. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Leiden University and graduated with a combined Honours degree in philosophy and studies in religion at the University of Sydney. His current roles include Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo; Honorary Research Associate for the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney; faculty at Iran Academia; and campaign manager for Why Is My Curriculum White? -- Australasia. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles, is author of Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues.