CANBERRA: A Kurdish asylum seeker has won one of the most important Australian literature prizes, but could not receive the award personally as he is being kept in an offshore detention centre.
Iranian Kurd Behrouz Boochani was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature in Melbourne, which comes with prize money of 100,000 Australian dollars ($73,000).
Boochani won for his book “No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison.” It was also judged to be the best non-fiction book.
He has been living in the detention centre on Manus Island since 2013, and like all detainees, is not allowed to leave the island.
The win gave him a “paradoxical feeling,” Boochani said. “I don’t want to celebrate this achievement while I still see many innocent people suffering around me,” he told The Age daily.
“Give us freedom. We have committed no crime, we are only seeking asylum,” he said.
According to his publishers, Boochani wrote the book via SMS text messages which he sent from Manus.. — dpa
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