Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist, associate professor at UNSW, human rights defender, poet, and film producer. He was imprisoned in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre from 2013 until 2017, when the imprisonment was deemed illegal. He has been recently transferred to Port Moresby with no indication of how long he will be held there.

Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary ‘Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time‘; he has had numerous articles published in leading media, including the Guardian and The Huffington Post. His writing has focussed on the deprivation of human rights of refugees and the brutality experienced on Manus Island. He has won several awards and was recently appointed visiting law professor at Birkbeck, University of London.

His memoir, ‘No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison‘, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. Boochani managed to compose the book in a series of text messages which were then translated from Farsi into English by Omid Tofighian.

See here for a video of his acceptance speech. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/01/behrouz-boochani-on-literary-prize-words-still-have-the-power-to-challenge-inhumane-systems

Behrouz Boochani will be speaking, via videolink, on his writing and activism, with Jane Archer from Scottish PEN and an audience in the Glasgow University Memorial Chapel on Monday 30^th September, 2019: 13:00-14:00.