‘Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man.’ – From the Foreword by Man Booker Prize-winning author Richard Flanagan
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.
