By New York Times |Sydney |Updated: February 1, 2019 10:06:30 pm
Detained refugee wins top Australian prize for book written via WhatsApp
Behrouz Boochani, a writer, journalist and filmmaker who has been held in offshore detention on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for more than five years. won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature for his book, “No Friend but the Mountains.”
(Written by Isabella Kwai and Livia Albeck-Ripka)
A stateless Kurdish-Iranian asylum-seeker detained by the Australian government won the country’s highest-paying literary prize Thursday. But he could not attend the festivities to accept the award.
Behrouz Boochani, a writer, journalist and filmmaker who has been held in offshore detention on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for more than five years, won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature for his book, “No Friend but the Mountains.”
The prestigious award, selected from a short list of winners in other categories, grants the winning author 125,000 Australian dollars (about $90,000) and counts the country’s most prominent writers among its recipients.
Boochani fled Iran after police there arrested several of his journalist colleagues and raided his office. After the Australian navy intercepted his boat as he was trying to reach the country, he was sent to Manus Island in 2013.
Since then, he has written articles for numerous local and international outlets. His book, which recounts his experiences in detention, was written over five years through WhatsApp texts in Farsi to his translator, Omid Tofighian, who accepted the award in his stead Thursday night in Melbourne.
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