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No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani
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No Friend but the Mountains

Writing from Manus Prison

$36.75

Get for $14.99 with membership
Translator Omid Tofighian
Length 13 hours
Language English
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Winner of Australia’s richest literary award, No Friend but the Mountains is Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani’s account of his detainment on Australia’s notorious Manus Island prison. Composed entirely by text message, this work represents the harrowing experience of stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.

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 Prize for Literature, 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.

“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

BEHROUZ BOOCHANI is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, and adjunct associate professor at the University of NSW. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his book, No Friend but the Mountains, won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature. It has been published in 23 countries and is currently being adapted for both stage and screen. A political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea before he escaped in 2019, Boochani now resides in Wellington, New Zealand.

OMID TOFIGHIAN is a translator, lecturer, researcher, and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, rhetoric, religion, popular culture, transnationalism, displacement, and discrimination. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Leiden University and graduated with a combined Honours degree in philosophy and studies in religion at the University of Sydney. His current roles include Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo; 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. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles, and is author of Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues, and is translator of Behrouz Boochani’s book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison.

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Reviews

No Friend but the Mountains deserves a place beside some of the world’s most famous prison narratives and testaments about living in a time of genocide, slavery, and state-sponsored oppression. It brings to mind various literary siblings: the ways in which The Diary of Anne Frank sketched the life of a young girl in the period leading up to her murder in the Holocaust; how Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl painted Harriet Jacobs’s life as a fugitive in the United States; the means by which One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn showed the daily oppression of a man living in a Soviet gulag; how The Autobiography of Malcolm X charted the movement of a man through prison life and into militancy as the most famous Black Muslim in America; and how Martin Luther King Jr. condemned arbitrary imprisonment and racial segregation in The Letter from Birmingham Jail . . . In a time of mounting hysteria and paranoia with regard to the arrival of migrants in developed countries, Behrouz Boochani reminds us that 68.5 million displaced people in the world today are the same as us. We could be them, tomorrow. As war, crime, famine, and civil disruption result in growing numbers of asylum seekers, Boochani’s deeply disturbing memoir introduces readers to hard realities and reveals the wounded hearts of captors and prisoners alike. Expand reviews