Image copyright Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux/eyevine Image caption Behrouz Boochani has become a chronicler of the lives of aslyum seekers on Manus Island

An asylum seeker and journalist detained for years by Australia on an island in the Pacific has been awarded the country's richest literary prize.

Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian Kurd, wrote No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by text message from inside a detention centre.

It won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, worth A$100,000 (£55,000).

Boochani remains on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island and is not allowed to enter Australia.

The controversial detention centre in which he was held was closed in late 2017. He - and hundreds of others - have since been moved to alternative accommodation.

Australia has a strict policy on any asylum seekers who arrive by boat, vowing that they will never be resettled in Australia, even if found to be genuine refugees. It says its policies are necessary to deter dangerous attempts to reach the country by sea.

Alongside the prize for literature, No Friend But the Mountains also won the Prize for Non-Fiction at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, worth A$25,000.

Speaking to the BBC from Manus Island on a night when fellow writers who won awards were celebrating in Melbourne, Boochani said the prizes gave him "a very paradoxical feeling".

"In some ways I am very happy because we are able to get attention to this plight and you know many people have become aware of this situation, which is great... But on the other side I feel that I don't have the right to have celebration - because I have many friends here who are suffering in this place.

"[The] first thing for us is to get freedom and get off from this island and start a new life."

The book was written in Farsi during the years in which Boochani was held in the now-closed detention centre, mostly through WhatsApp messages sent to the translator, Omid Tofighian.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Writer Behrouz Boochani sent passages for his book largely by text message.

"WhatsApp is like my office," he said. "I did not write on paper because at that time the guards each week or each month would attack our room and search our property. I was worried I might lose my writing, so it was better for me to write it and just send it out."

Boochani, who was first detained in 2013 after arriving by boat from South East Asia, has become the most well-known voice from inside Australia's controversial offshore detention system.

He writes regularly for the UK's Guardian newspaper, tweets prolifically about life on Manus and spars with online defenders of Australia's tough policies. He has even shot and co-directed a documentary - Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time - from detention. Again, he used his phone.

Last year, the US agreed to resettle some of the refugees from the offshore detention centre on Manus and the island nation of Nauru. More than 100 refugees have since been relocated, but Boochani is still waiting for further information after an interview with US officials a few months ago.

He has been granted refugee status in Papua New Guinea but like many of the refugees does not want to stay there.

He said he decided to flee Iran because of problems with the authorities over his journalism: "I didn't want to go to prison in Iran so I left and when I got to Australia they put me in this prison for years."

Judges of the literature prize described his book as "a stunning work of art and critical theory which evades simple description".

"Distinctive narrative formations are used, from critical analysis to thick description to poetry to dystopian surrealism," they said. "The writing is beautiful and precise, blending literary traditions emanating from across the world, but particularly from within Kurdish practices."

The entry guidelines for the Victorian Prize for Literature stipulate that writers must be Australian citizens or permanent residents. However the Wheeler Centre, which administers the literature awards, accepted the recommendation of its judges and made an exception for Boochani's book.

Australia's refugee policies have been widely covered by the world's press and criticised by the UN and global human rights groups, although some European politicians have praised them.

But Boochani wants readers of his book to understand what he says has been a "systematic" attempt to strip refugees and asylum seekers of their "identity, humanity and individuality".

"We are not angels and we are not evil," he said. "We are humans, simple humans, we are innocent people."

An excerpt from No Friends But The Mountains

Days without any plans /

Lost and disoriented /

Minds still caught up in the waves of the ocean /

Searching for peace of mind on new plains /

But the prison's plains are like a corridor leading to a fighters' gym /

And the smell of warm sweat everywhere is driving everyone insane.

One month has passed since I was exiled to Manus. I am a piece of meat thrown into an unknown land; a prison of filth and heat. I dwell among a sea of people with faces stained and shaped by anger, faces scarred with hostility. Every week, one or two planes land in the island's wreck of an airport and throngs of people disembark. Hours later, they are tossed into the prison among the deafening ruckus of displaced people, like sheep to a slaughterhouse.</s>The winner of this year's $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature couldn't be at the awards presentation on Thursday evening. He was unavoidably detained elsewhere - on Manus Island, where he has been incarcerated for more than five years.

Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani's​ poetic memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (translated by Omid Tofighian), not only won Australia's richest writing prize, but also the $25,000 non-fiction prize in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, which were presented by the creative industries minister, Martin Foley.

Elise Valmorbida​ won the fiction prize for her historical novel, The Madonna of the Mountains, and Kate Lilley won the poetry prize for her controversial collection, Tilt, in which she wrote about being sexually abused as a teenager by friends of her mother, the late playwright Dorothy Hewett.

Other winners were: drama, Kendall Feaver, The Almighty Sometimes; writing for young adults, Ambelin​ and Ezekiel​ Kwaymullina​, Catching Teller Crow; Indigenous writing, Kim Scott, Taboo; unpublished manuscript award, Victoria Hannah, Kokomo; and people's choice award, Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull.</s>(Hatha al-Youm | Iraq News )-ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A Kurdish Iranian refugee living in detention on Manus Island has won Australia’s richest literary prize. Behrouz Boochani won the Victorian Prize for Literature for his memoir No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. The prize is part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards that honours Australian writing in seven categories. Those winners then go on to compete for the Victorian Prize for Literature, worth $100,000. Boochani had won in the non-fiction category, which comes with a $25,000 prize. He was, however, unable to attend the ceremony as he is detained on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea under Australia’s controversial refugee policy that prevents asylum seekers from arriving in the country by boat. A journalist, Boochani fled Iran in 2013 and made his way to Australia’s Christmas Island from where he was transferred to Manus Island. He has drawn global attention to the plight of hundreds detained in the island centre that was ruled illegal in 2016. Many remain on Manus, however, caught up in legal complications. He wrote No Friend But the Mountains via text message. Speaking with the Guardian Australia after learning he had won in the non-fiction category, Boochani said he didn’t know how to react. “I certainly did not write this book just to win an award… My main aim has always been for the people in Australia and around the world to understand deeply how this system has tortured innocent people on Manus and Nauru in a systematic way for almost six years. I hope this award will bring more attention to our situation, and create change, and end this barbaric policy,” he said. Through social media, Boochani continues to document the hardships he and his fellow captives on the island endure.Yesterday an innocent refugee became a victim of Villawood prison camp in Sydney. Today a young refugee attempted suicide in Manus. Fortunately he survived. I don’t know how long this gov wants to continue this violation of human rights.#Manus— Behrouz Boochani (@BehrouzBoochani) January 25, 2019</s>Behrouz Boochani, the refugee who has been incarcerated on Manus Island for the past five years, will find out on Thursday whether he has won Australia's richest writing prize after being ruled out of both the Walkey book award and the NSW Premier's literary Prize.

Mr Boochani has a one-in-six chance to win a Victorian Premier's Literary Award on Thursday and could then be up for the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature.

The Kurdish-Iranian journalist's book, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, which was published to enthusiastic reviews in July last year, has been shortlisted in the non-fiction category - worth $25,000 to the winner – along with five other titles.

Like the Prime Minister's and the NSW Premier's literary prizes, the entry guidelines for the VPLA stipulate that writers must be Australian citizens or permanent residents. However, the Wheeler Centre, which administers the Victorian prizes, has accepted the recommendation of its judges and made an exception to the eligibility criteria to allow his book to be considered.</s>(Hatha al-Youm | Iraq News )- ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – An Iranian Kurd has been awarded Australia's richest literary prize for a book that he wrote while held in a notorious Australian detention center.Behrouz Boochani, an asylum seeker from the Kurdish city of Ilam, arrived in Australia by boat in 2013. He was immediately captured and transported to one of the country's offshore immigration processing center, located on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island."My main aim has always been for the people in Australia and around the world to understand deeply how this system has tortured innocent people on Manus and Nauru in a systematic way for almost six years," he told the Guardian, referring to two different island processing centers.Four years into his detention, Boochani produced a documentary film with his mobile phone that depicted the day-to-day life of refugees in the camp.Due to the poor quality of the available internet connection, he was forced to send out the movie one clip at a time. The connection would continue to limit his communications, as he was only able to send out his later work, for which he received the literary prize, chapter by chapter through messaging apps.In 2018, he finished his debut novel, entitled, "No Friends But Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison," which won him the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards of $25,000 AUD for a work of non-fiction and an additional $100,000 AUD for the Victorian Prize for Literature. The amount of money totals approximately $90,000 USD, as announced on Thursday.The book is a "voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile," the awards committee said in a statement on the website of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, which administers the prize.The judges' report stated that Boochani produced "a stunning work of art and critical theory which evades simple description," and used "distinctive narrative formation... from critical analysis to thick description to poetry to dystopian surrealism. The writing is beautiful and precise, blending literary traditions emanating from across the world, but particularly from within Kurdish practices."Translation of the work, done by Omid Tofighian, also received high praise, with the report continuing that "the clarity with which ideas and knowledge are expressed is also a triumph of literary translation."Boochani is one of almost 600 refugees that still reside on Manus' camps, where the tough conditions that asylum seekers are subjected to have drawn widespread criticism.He added, "I hope this award will bring more attention to our situation, and create change, and end this barbaric policy."Australia claims its policies are meant to stop deaths of refugees caused by traffickers who bring them for money on boats that are often unsafe and can capsize or sink. Authorities at the processing centers are purportedly telling asylum seekers the would never be allowed on mainland Australia.Editing by John J. Catherine</s>An Iranian asylum seeker in detention on Manus Island has won the Victorian Prize for Literature.

Behrouz Boochani took out the top prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards on Thursday for his novel No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison.

Boochani's novel also won the Prize for Non-Fiction, worth $25,000.

Boochani, a Kurdish journalist, has been in detention since 2013.

"I don't want to celebrate this achievement while I still see many innocent people suffering around me," he told The Age.

"This is why it's a paradoxical feeling.

"We have committed no crime, we are only seeking asylum."</s>Behrouz Boochani has been detained since trying to enter Australia by boat in 2013

An Iranian Kurdish writer detained on a remote island for nearly six years under Australia’s harsh anti-migrant policy has won the county’s richest literary prize for his poetic memoir about trying but failing to rebuild his life.

The award to Behrouz Boochani’s of the A$100,000 (£55,000) Victorian Prize for Literature has embarrassed Australia’s Morrison government.

Boochani, 35, a journalist and filmmaker, wrote most of No Friend But The Mountain on an old iPhone. He has been held in an Australian immigration detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island since 2013.

Under Australian law, anyone caught trying to reach the country by small boat can never be allowed to settle in the country and is banished to Pacific island detention centres.</s>The winner of Australia’s richest literary prize did not attend the ceremony.

His absence was not by choice.

Behrouz Boochani, whose debut book won both the $25,000 non-fiction prize at the Victorian premier’s literary awards and the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature on Thursday night, is not allowed into Australia.

The Kurdish Iranian writer is an asylum seeker who has been kept in purgatory on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for almost six years, first behind the wire of the Australian offshore detention centre, and then in alternative accommodation on the island.

Now his book No Friend But the Mountains – composed one text message at a time from within the detention centre – has been recognised by a government from the same country that denied him access and locked him up.

It is, he said, “a paradoxical feeling”.

“I really don’t know what to say,” he told Guardian Australia in a conversation before the main award was announced, when he only knew of the non-fiction prize. “I certainly did not write this book just to win an award.

“My main aim has always been for the people in Australia and around the world to understand deeply how this system has tortured innocent people on Manus and Nauru in a systematic way for almost six years. I hope this award will bring more attention to our situation, and create change, and end this barbaric policy.”

Boochani speaks via text messages, because his internet connection keeps cutting out.

For an asylum seeker kept in offshore detention to win such a major prize “brings enormous shame to the Australian government”, he said.

Accepting the award on Boochani’s behalf was his translator, Omid Tofighian, who worked with interpreter Moones Mansoubi to translate Boochani’s Farsi text to English.

“You can’t underestimate the impact that [this win] will have on Australian politics and Australian refugee politics – not only in Australia [but for] displaced and exiled people all over the world,” Tofighian said.

“This is one of the most vicious forms of neocolonial oppression that is taking over the world at the moment – and to address this book in this way and to recognise it and draw attention to the narrative it is presenting will have repercussions for many generations to come.”

The awards are split into seven categories, which are judged by a panel. In 2017 and 2018, women won each category, and they dominated the winners’ list again this year, with Elise Valmorbida winning the fiction prize with The Madonna of the Mountains; Kendall Feaver winning the drama prize for her play The Almighty Sometimes; Kate Lilley winning the poetry prize for Tilt; Victoria Hannan winning the $15,000 unpublished manuscript prize for Kokomo; and Bri Lee winning the people’s choice award for her memoir Eggshell Skull.

After last year’s Nib prize, it is the second people’s choice award for the debut, a memoir that tracks Lee’s journey from being a judge’s associate to seeking justice through the courts for childhood sexual assault.

She now receives “hundreds” of emails and messages from other sexual abuse survivors.

“I respond to everyone,” she said. “Overall I get enough messages of such hope and optimism, and people just actually make life-changing decisions after reading this book, so even though I also get a lot of upsetting messages it all comes good. All I can hope for as a writer is to reach people in some way.”

Lee said the unexpected commercial success of the book had given her “the most wonderful gift of freedom to write what I want next”.

She is currently working on a series of essays.

The young adult prize was won by Amelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, for Catching Teller Crow.

Western Australian author Kim Scott, a dual Miles Franklin award winner, won the prize for Indigenous writing for his novel Taboo, which deals with a modern community coming to terms with the historical and cultural legacy of a massacre on Noongar country in south-west WA.

It is based on an experience in his own country at Ravensthorpe, halfway between Albany and Esperance.

“My ancestral country is regarded as taboo by many Aboriginal people because of the killing that happened there in the late 19th century,” he said. “I didn’t even know about it until I was an adult, that nasty edge to our history … the emotional infrastructure of the times didn’t enable or perhaps allow it.”

Scott said the novel was for “a lot of us who have been damaged by colonisation, and I would imagine that’s non-Aboriginal people as well ... healing and strengthening our relationship to pre-colonial heritage.

“It’s all about foundations and being grounded ... and finding a way for an emotional and spiritual infrastructure. Stories are really important for that but so are things like the Uluru statement. They help us figure out a way to deal with this stuff.”

Winner: The Madonna of the Mountains by Elise Valmorbida

Shortlist: Flames by Robbie Arnott; Ironbark by Jay Carmichael; The Fireflies of Autumn: And Other Tales of San Ginese by Moreno Giovannoni; The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones; Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

Winner: No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani

Shortlist: Staying: A Memoir by Jessie Cole; The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper; Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee; Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic; Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

Winner: The Almighty Sometimes by Kendall Feaver

Shortlist: Going Down by Michele Lee; Barbara and the Camp Dogs by Ursula Yovich and Alana Valentine

Shortlist: Amelia Westlake by Erin Gough; Between Us by Clare Atkins

Shortlist: Common People by Tony Birch; Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko; Blakwork by Alison Whittaker</s>An Iranian asylum-seeker detained in under Australian laws has won Australia's most valuable literary prize for a book he reportedly wrote using the

Behrouz Boochani, a Kurd who has been held on PNG's since 2013, was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature on Thursday, said a statement on a government website for the Australian state of

The and filmmaker was awarded the USD 72,600 prize for his book "No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison".

He will receive an additional Aus $25,000 after it also won the non-fiction category.

"(Boochani's) award was accepted by the book's Omid Tofighian, who worked with Boochani over five years to bring the stories to life," the state website said.

said Boochani wrote the work on his phone and sent it to Tofighian bit-by-bit in text messages.

This was because he felt unsafe in the guarded camp, which was shuttered last year after a local court ruling and the asylum-seekers moved elsewhere on the island.

For years has sent asylum-seekers who try to enter the country by boat to or in the Pacific for processing, with those found to be refugees barred from resettling in

The harsh policy is meant to deter people embarking on treacherous sea journeys, but the and other rights groups have criticised the camps' conditions and long detention periods.

Boochani's book beat 27 other shortlisted works published last year in to win the overall prize.</s>Back in August, when Behrouz Boochani was speaking with NPR over the phone, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist said his debut book, written mostly with texts he sent from an Australian detention center, was meant "to make a challenge against this system, to tell the truth to people." He wasn't motivated by money.

On Thursday, his work earned him some money anyway.

The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, which are among Australia's most prestigious literary prizes, singled out Boochani's No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison for their highest honor: the Victorian Prize for Literature. His book also won in the nonfiction category.

The Victorian Prize carries a purse of 100,000 Australian dollars, while the nonfiction award brings 25,000 on top of that — or about $90,000 in USD, all told.

But because Boochani remains detained on Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea, at the same offshore facility where he's been held since 2013, his translator, Omid Tofighian, picked the awards up at the ceremony in his stead. And Boochani had to deliver his remarks through a recorded video message.

"I have always said I believe in words and literature. I believe that literature has the potential to make change and challenge structures of power," he said. "Literature has the power to give us freedom."

Boochani himself has not enjoyed physical freedom for more than five years now. He has lived in a kind of legal purgatory since he fled from Iran to Indonesia and then tried to travel to Australia, where he had hoped to obtain asylum after his pro-Kurdish publication attracted the scrutiny of Iranian security forces.

Instead, the boat he'd been riding was intercepted by the Australian authorities, who eventually transferred him to Manus Island. It is there, at what the Australian government calls an "offshore processing centre" — and what what he calls a "prison" — that Boochani has lived for years.

Australia first reached an agreement with Papua New Guinea, back in 2013, to hold some asylum-seekers on its small northern neighbor. Since then the practice has received vehement pushback — including from Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court, which ruled it illegal in 2016, and from multiple international aid organizations.

In a report issued late last year, Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières, said dozens of the detainees had attempted suicide and still more had considered it.

"While many of our patients had experienced trauma," said MSF's Christine Rufener, "it was the Australian policy of indefinite processing that destroyed all their hope for the future and devastated their mental health."

Despite the ruling of Papua New Guinea's high court, and despite the Manus Island camp's formal closure later, hundreds of asylum-seekers continue to languish on the island without much idea of what may come next.

During Boochani's years-long detention, he wrote his book in Farsi, in dispatch after dispatch sent via WhatsApp, which Tofighian then translated into English and organized. The result is a hybrid text that eschews easy classification, combining journalism, poetry and critical theory to craft what the prize's judges called "a new understanding both of Australia's actions and of Australia itself."

"Altogether, this is a demanding work of significant achievement," they explained in their citation. "No Friend But the Mountains is a literary triumph, devastating and transcendent."

In the end, Boochani told NPR, his work in some way is also a gesture of hope: "We all hope that finally, after five years, we get freedom in a place like America or other countries."
Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, incarcerated for nearly 6 years in the Australian-run Manus Regional Processing Centre, is awarded Australia's richest literary prize, the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction.