No Friend But the Mountains

Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains...In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since.People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests...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 first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?

Winner of Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Victorian Prize for Literature 2019 Winner of Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Non-Fiction Book Award 2019 Winner of Australian Book Industry Award (ABIA) General Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2019

'Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man.' -- Richard Flanagan
'Boochani has produced a literary, journalistic and philosophical tour de force. It may well stand as one of the most important books published in Australia in two decades ...' -- The Saturday Paper
'Not for the faint-hearted, it's a powerful, devastating insight into a situation that's so often seen through a political – not personal – lens.' -- GQ
'It is an unforgettable account of man's inhumanity to man that reads like something out of Orwell or Kafka, and is aptly described by Tofighian as 'horrific surrealism'. It is clear from Boochani's writing that he is a highly educated and philosophical man; he segues effortlessly between prose and poetry, both equally powerful.' -- The Australian Financial Review
'In the absence of images, turn to this book to fathom what we have done, what we continue to do. It is, put simply, the most extraordinary and important book I have ever read.' -- Good Reading

Behrouz Boochani graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; he holds a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. He is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya; is Honorary Member of PEN International; winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya Award for journalism; and he is non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time; collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh's play Manus; and author of No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador 2018). Translator Omid Tofighian is a lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, rhetoric, religion, popular culture, transnationalism, displacement and discrimination. He completed his PhD in philosophy at Leiden University and graduated with a combined Honours degree in philosophy and studies in religion at the University of Sydney. His current roles include Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo; Honorary Research Associate for the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney; faculty at Iran Academia; and campaign manager for Why Is My Curriculum White? - Australasia. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles, is author of Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and translator of Behrouz Boochani's book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018).

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