Behrouz Boochani’s book, “No Friend but the Mountains,” won the prestigious Victorian Prize for Literature in 2019 while he was still detained on Manus Island.Credit...Birgit Krippner for The New York Times
FEATURE
He fled Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. He exposed Australia’s offshore detention camps — from the inside. He survived, stateless, for seven years. What’s next?
By Megan K. Stack
Aug. 4, 2020
It was hard, in the end, to figure out what to take and what to leave. Spread over the linoleum floor of Behrouz Boochani’s motel room were drifts of clothing, books in Persian and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs. It was a November morning last year in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea; outside, roosters screamed under a stinging equatorial sun. Boochani’s room was cramped; the door propped open by a wastebasket stuffed with the remains of chicken dinners. Everything he owned, all the objects and talismans gathered during six and a half years of imprisonment, were crammed into this small room. Boochani had been an Iranian dissident and a boat person; a detainee and a refugee. In the morning he would strike out again, hoping to reach yet another new life. It didn’t matter, really, what stuff he carried along. “I don’t care about these books,” he said suddenly, though many of them contained Boochani’s own work.
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