Behrouz Boochani

The journalist who used the power of story to expose Australia’s offshore regime

In 2013, indigenous Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was forced to flee his homeland in Iran after the Kurdish magazine Werya, where he was working as a journalist, attracted the attention of Iran’s ruling regime which subsequently arrested many of his colleagues.

Behrouz fled to Australia, however upon arriving at Christmas Island, he was sent to the Australian-run Manus Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea, where he was held for over half a decade under conditions which were reported to be harsh and inhumane, the United Nations expressing "serious safety concerns” for detainees due to ”instances of assault, sexual abuse, self-harm and suspicious deaths” happening at the Centre, which finally closed in 2017.

While detained, Behrouz chronicled his experience at Manus on a smuggled mobile phone, where he tapped out his story in Farsi in a series of single messages, subsequently translated into English by Omid Tofighian. The resulting book,  No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, received a host of awards including Australia’s highest literary accolade, the Victorian Prize for Literature. While on Manus Island, Boochani also co-directed the documentary film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, shot at Manus Island with his smartphone over a period of six months. During this time, he also worked for The Guardian as a correspondent, highlighting the conditions on Manus Island.

Since gaining his freedom in 2017, Boochani has continued with his human rights advocacy work through storytelling. In 2018, co-created the video installation Remain with Iranian-born Melbourne photographer Hoda Afshar, which featured his spoken word poetry about human suffering.

Behrouz graduated from Tarbiat Modares University and the Kharazmi University, with a master's degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. He is currently working as a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury and as a Researcher at UNSW.