A refugee held in a remote Pacific detention center has won Australia’s top literature prize with his debut book, which he wrote on his mobile phone and delivered one chapter at a time via WhatsApp.
Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian held in an Australian-run camp on a Papua New Guinea island, won the A$100,000 (US$72,485) Victorian Prize for literature on Thursday with his book No Friends but the Mountains.
Boochani, who has been held in the Manus Island camp since shortly after he was plucked off a refugee boat on its way to Australia six years ago, said he hopes the prize will focus attention on the plight of more than 1,000 people in Australia’s offshore camps.
PLIGHT OF REFUGEES
“I don’t want to celebrate this achievement while I still see many innocent people suffering around me,” Boochani said in an exchange of text messages.
Boochani has been a prominent critic of the treatment of people under Australia’s hard-line immigration policy.
Asylum seekers intercepted at sea are sent for “processing” to three camps in Papua New Guinea and one on the South Pacific island of Nauru, where many have languished for years. They are not allowed to set foot in Australia.
WRITTEN BY PHONE
Boochani said one of his biggest fears when he was writing the book was that his telephone would be confiscated by camp guards.
“I was worried that if they attacked my room they would take my property,” he said.
He wrote the book in his native Farsi and sent it via the WhatsApp messaging service to a translator in Australia.
The award was announced on Thursday at a ceremony in Australia, a country Boochani has been banned from ever visiting.
“It brings enormous shame to the Australian government,” Boochani said of the policy responsible for his plight.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened