Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate, and filmmaker. His memoir, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia’s richest literary prize, and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction. Boochani has written for the Kurdish-language magazine Werya; is an Honorary Member of PEN International; won the 2017 Amnesty International Australia Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya Award for journalism; and 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, HuffPost, 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, and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh’s play Manus. He graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; and he holds a Master’s degree in political science, political geography, and geopolitics.