Uploaded February 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre
Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate, filmmaker, and former Manus Island detainee, Behrouz Boochani, discusses his second book, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings. Translated and edited by Dr Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi, the book is a joint project by the same team who produced No Friend but the Mountains. Their long collaboration puts them in a unique position to bring these stories to readers and highlight the plight of refugees around the world.
Over six years of imprisonment on Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book No Friend but the Mountains which was painstakingly typed out in text messages while he was incarcerated. No Friend but the Mountains won the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Literature and Non-Fiction, the 2019 Australian Book Industry Award for Non-fiction Book of the Year, the 2019 National Biography Prize, and many other prestigious awards.
In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which speaks for the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world.
In his follow up book, Freedom, Only Freedom, his collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative, and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout Western nation-states and beyond.
In his first and only Adelaide event, Behrouz Boochani was in conversation with award-winning journalist Professor Peter Greste, with an introductory presentation delivered by Freedom, Only Freedom editor and long-term translator/collaborator Dr Omid Tofighian.
www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au
Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre
Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate, filmmaker, and former Manus Island detainee, Behrouz Boochani, discusses his second book, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings. Translated and edited by Dr Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi, the book is a joint project by the same team who produced No Friend but the Mountains. Their long collaboration puts them in a unique position to bring these stories to readers and highlight the plight of refugees around the world.
Over six years of imprisonment on Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book No Friend but the Mountains which was painstakingly typed out in text messages while he was incarcerated. No Friend but the Mountains won the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Literature and Non-Fiction, the 2019 Australian Book Industry Award for Non-fiction Book of the Year, the 2019 National Biography Prize, and many other prestigious awards.
In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which speaks for the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world.
In his follow up book, Freedom, Only Freedom, his collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative, and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout Western nation-states and beyond.
In his first and only Adelaide event, Behrouz Boochani was in conversation with award-winning journalist Professor Peter Greste, with an introductory presentation delivered by Freedom, Only Freedom editor and long-term translator/collaborator Dr Omid Tofighian.
www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au
