• WINNER - NSW PREMIER'S AWARD 2019
• WINNER - VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY PRIZE FOR LITERATURE & FOR NON-FICTION 2019
• WINNER - ABIA GENERAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019
Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains...
Since 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani has been held in the Manus Island offshore processing centre. 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 firsthand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.
In his homeland, people would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests. Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?
"A chant, a cry from the heart, a lament, fuelled by a fierce urgency, written with the lyricism of a poet, the literary skills of a novelist, and the profound insights of an astute observer of human behaviour and the ruthless politics of a cruel and unjust imprisonment." Arnold Zable