Behrouz Boochani is no stranger to Christchurch, his first home in Aotearoa thanks to his award winning debut book, No Friend But the Mountains. Please join us to welcome him back with this second book, Freedom, Only Freedom – a collection of his writings combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature.
Translated and edited by 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.
Host Tina Makereti will discuss with Behrouz his tenacious activism, prison reform, the rights of refugees and more.
In the articles, essays, and poems Behrouz 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 book, his collected writings are combined with a foreword by award-winning Wiradjuri writer and friend of Behrouz, Tara June Winch. Other contributors to this book include several prominent Australian and international commentators, including fellow Manus Island detainee and writer Shaminda Kanapathi, former Nauru detainee and multidisciplinary artist/architect Elahe Zivardar, and Walkley award-winning journalists Erik Jensen, Helen Davidson and Ben Doherty, among many
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 the western hemisphere and beyond.
This is one of two WORD events happening at The Piano on Wednesday 16 November – buy tickets to both and save!
Our friends at UBS will have the book for sale on the night, or you can order online here.
Supported by the Ngāi Tahu Centre at the University of Canterbury.
Behrouz portrait image credit: Ehsan K Hazaveh. Book cover with thanks to Bloomsbury.
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