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No Friend But The Mountains

No Friend But The Mountains 5

Writing From Manus Prison

by Behrouz Boochani
Paperback
Publication Date: 31/07/2018
4/5 Rating 5 Reviews

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WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY PRIZE 2019 FOR LITERATURE AND FOR NON-FICTION

Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains...

Since 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani has been held in the Manus Island offshore processing centre.

People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests...

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 through five years of incarceration and exile.

Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?

'A chant, a cry from the heart, a lament, fuelled by a fierce urgency, written with the lyricism of a poet, the literary skills of a novelist, and the profound insights of an astute observer of human behaviour and the ruthless politics of a cruel and unjust imprisonment.' ARNOLD ZABLE

ISBN:
9781760555382
9781760555382
Category:
Diaries
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
31-07-2018
Publisher:
Pan Macmillan Australia
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
416
Dimensions (mm):
233x154x31mm
Weight:
0.52kg
Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was a writer and editor for the Kurdish language magazine Werya in Iran. He is a Visiting Professor, Birkbeck Law School; Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Honorary Member of PEN International; and 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. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, 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. His book, No Friend But The Mountains- Writing From Manus Prison won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature in addition to the Nonfiction category. He has also won the Special Award at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Australian Book Industry Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and the National Biography Prize.

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4.4

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5 Reviews

It's difficult to read this book but it should be essential reading for every Australian. The way Australia has (and still is) treating legitimate refugees is something we should all be ashamed of and protesting about. Behrouz's writing style is unusual and poetic. His descriptions of the Australian staff are blunt and insightful. You can't 'enjoy' this book but you must read it.

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Good

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An interesting book which conveys the sorry story of a Refugee. Worthy of note is the analysis of the prison system where the writer uses the French Philosopher Foucault's work to compare the systems. This approach was quite relevant and new. Academics could build on this theme, and decision makers should articulate from this viewpoint what is happening in these detention centers.

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