Written in secrecy on a contraband mobile phone from Manus detention centre by journalist Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains became the bestselling, award-winning book of 2018.
Associate Professor Behrouz Boochani graduated from Tarbiat Moallem
University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; he holds
a Masters degree in political science, political geography and
geopolitics.
He is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural
advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was a writer for the Kurdish
language magazine Werya; is 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. 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.
He was a political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian
government in Papua New Guinea for almost seven years. In November
2019 Behrouz escaped to New Zealand. He now resides in
Christchurch.
Translator Dr Omid Tofighian is a lecturer, researcher and
community advocate based at the American University of Cairo and
University of Sydney. His work combines philosophy with interests
in rhetoric, religion, popular culture, transnationalism,
displacement and discrimination. He contributes to community arts
and cultural projects and works with asylum seekers, refugees and
young people from Western Sydney. He has published numerous book
chapters and journal articles and is author of Myth and Philosophy
in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016). He has translated a number
of articles for Behrouz Boochani for the Guardian.
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