No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison
Author: Behrouz Boochani
Translator: Omid Tofighian
Publisher: Anansi International
Print Length: 416 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Autobiography or Memoir
Area: Australia, Papua New Guinea, Asia-Pacific, Pacific Oceania
Topic: Lived Experience, Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Asylum & Refugee System, Refugees & Forced Migration, Migrants, Migration, Statelessness, Exile & Exodus, Humanity, Crimes against Humanity, Detainment, Immigration Control, Imprisonment, Refugee Resettlement, Resistance, Suffering, Survival, Testimonies
The Award-winning International Bestselling Story of One Man’s Six Year Detention in Australia
‘A powerfully vivid account of the experiences of a refugee: desperation, brutality, suffering, and all observed with an eye that seems to see everything and told in a voice that’s equal to the task.’ – Phillip Pullman
In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country’s most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. This book is the result.
Boochani spent nearly five years typing passages of this book one text at a time from a secret mobile phone in prison. Compiled and translated from Farsi, they form an incredible story of how escaping political persecution in Iran, he ended up trapped as a stateless person. This vivid, gripping portrait of his years of incarceration and exile shines devastating light on the fates of so many people, as borders close around the world.
No Friend but the Mountains is both a brave act of witness and a moving testament to the humanity of all people, in the most extreme of circumstances.
‘A brilliant book. No Friend but the Mountains can rightly take its place on the shelf of world prison literature . . . It is a profound victory for a young poet who showed us all how much words can still matter.’ – Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Table of Contents
Foreword
1. Under Moonlight / The Colour of Anxiety
2. Mountains and Waves / Chesnuts and Death / That River… This Sea
3. The Raft of Purgatory / Moons Will Tell Terrible Truths
4. The Warship Meditations / Our Golshifteh Is Truly Beautiful
5. A Christmas (Island) Tale / A Stateless Rohingya Boy Sent Away to Follow the Star of Exile
6. The Wandering Kowlis Perform / The Barn Owls Watch
7. The Oldman Generator / The Prime Minister and His Daughters
8. Queueing as Torture: Manus Prison Logic / The Happy Cow
9. Father’s Day / The Magnificent Mago Tree and The Gentle Giant
10. Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty / A Mythic Topography of Manus Prison
11. The Flowers Resembling Chamomile / Infection: Manus Prison Syndrome
12. In Twilight / The Colours of War
No Friend but the Mountains: Translator’s Reflections
Translator’s Tale: A Window to the Mountains
Behrouz Boochani is an award-winning Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. His memoir No Friend But the Mountains (Pan Macmillan 2018, trans. Omid Tofighian) was written during his seven years of incarceration by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island prison. In November 2019, Behrouz escaped to New Zealand. He now resides in Wellington, New Zealand. He was a writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; and Honorary Member of PEN International. He graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; he holds a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. Currently, he has been appointed adjunct associate professor in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of NSW and visiting professor at Birkbeck Law School at the University of London.
Source: https://www.behrouzboochani.com/about-behrouz-boochani
More from Behrouz Boochani in this library, click here.
Omid Tofighian is an award-winning lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, popular culture, displacement and discrimination. He is Adjunct Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW; 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. His published works include Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016); he is the translator of Behouz Boochani’s multi-award winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018); and co-editor of ‘Refugee Filmmaking’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (2019).
Source: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/omid-tofighian
More from Omid Tofighian in this library, click here.