A review by blairmahoney
No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani

5.0

A powerful and important read by an asylum seeker who has been illegally detained by the Australian government on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island for the past six years, but it's not just one of those books to read out of a sense of duty, it's a carefully constructed piece of writing that is of great aesthetic merit. Of course it needs to be read by all politicians as a first step to changing Australia's inhumane 'border protection' policies, but it should be read by everyone who is interested in literature as well. It recently won Australia's richest literary award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. The circumstances of its composition are in themselves remarkable, with the book composed by Boochani in Farsi and sent as text messages on a cellphone that he had to keep hidden from prison. Boochani is a journalist and has had a lot of work published in The Guardian reporting on the conditions on Manus. There are a couple of essays by the translator included in the book and he does a good job of locating Boochani's work in the Kurdish literary tradition in particular, mentioning a lot of writers that I was completely unfamiliar with. Highly recommended.