Join award-winning Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, human rights defender and film producer Behrouz Boochani in conversation with fellow writer and activist Arnold Zable for his last public appearance in Australia before returning to New Zealand. This event is co-presented by MEAA and International PEN Melbourne Centre.

With a tribute to poet and refugee activist, Janet Galbraith, the founder of Writing Through Fences, and long-time collaborator with Behrouz.

Tickets: $20 full; $15 students, unemployed, MEAA members

Behrouz Boochani was imprisoned in Australia’s Manus Island detention centre in PNG from 2013 until it closed in 2017. While in detention, Boochani wrote No Friend But the Mountains on his mobile phone and sent it out to his friend and translator Omid Tofighian in the form of thousands of whatsapp messages. The memoir won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in 2019 while Behrouz remained on Manus Island. In 2020 Behrouz was granted refugee status in New Zealand and was made an Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury. His journalism and writings reveal the brutality of Australia’s system of offshore detention system of asylum seekers that is underpinned by a philosophical analysis of how incarceration works to dehumanise those trapped in these centres when legally seeking refuge. Freedom, Only Freedom published in 2022 combines his own writings with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature.

Arnold Zable is an Australian writer, novelist, storyteller and human rights activist. He was introduced to Behrouz Boochani in 2014, his second year of imprisonment on Manus Island, and they have collaborated on various campaigns and projects, including a series of dialogues published in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times. His books include Jewels and Ashes, Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, Sea of Many Returns, The Fig Tree, Violin Lessons, The Fighter, and most recently, The Watermill. He is the author of numerous stories, features, columns, works for theatre, and has long been active around social justice concerns, in particular those of asylum seekers and refugees. His awards include the Voltaire Prize for the advancement of freedom of expression, and the 2021 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He is the immediate past president of PEN Melbourne, its current patron, and a long-time member of the MEAA.

Readings Books will have books on sale for signing on the night.