Behrouz Boochani

Over seven 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. 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 this seminar, Behrouz Boochani talks about the body of art and knowledge produced by refugees and what these work can tell us about the wider structures of violence in migrant camps throughout the western hemisphere and beyond.

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, poet, and filmmaker, and has won multiple awards for his writing and activism. He is co-director of the film Chauka: Please Tell Us the Time (2017), and the author of Freedom, Only Freedom (forthcoming, 2022), as well as No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) for which he has won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction. He has served as a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the Ngāi Tahu research Centre at the University of Canterbury, and as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW.

The seminar will take place on Friday, the 29^th of April, 13:10 – 15:00, in Hugh Mackenzie Lecture Theatre HMLT104. People can also join via zoom: https://vuw.zoom.us/j/95854437272