Behrouz Boochani

A Kurdish writer, journalist, cultural manager and film producer, he is a graduate of the Tarbiat Moallem University and has a master’s degree in Political Science, Political Geography, and Geopolitics from the Tarbiat Modares University. He co-founded and produced the Kurdish-language magazine Werya and, as a result, had to flee from Iran. After attempting to reach Australia from Indonesia, he was imprisoned for six years in Australia’s offshore detention centre on Manus Island. He is an honorary member of PEN International, winner of the 2017 Amnesty International Australia Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Anna Politkovskaya Award for Journalism, and the 2020 Veu Lliure (Free Voice) Catalan PEN Prize. He is a non-resident visiting lecturer at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC) and a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. In 2017, he co-directed (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani), the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, and he publishes on a regular basis in The Guardian as well as writing for The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. He is also author of the book No Friend But the Mountains (in Catalan, Cap altre amic que les muntanyes, Raig Verd, 2020), which received the Victorian Prize for Literature, among other awards.