An asylum seeker who wrote a book using WhatsApp while in an Australian detention center on an island in the Pacific has won one of the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes.Behrouz Boochani written on his phone and delivered one chapter at a time via WhatsApp. He wrote the book in his native language Farsi and sent it to  translator Omid Tofighian in Australia. 

Victorian Prize judges called  No Friend But the Mountains “a stunning work of art and critical theory which evades simple description.” “The writing is beautiful and precise, blending literary traditions emanating from across the world, but particularly from within Kurdish practices,” they said.  Whats App is like my office,” Boochani told the BBC.“ 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.”

The award represents “a victory against the system that has reduced us to numbers,” Boochani told the Guardian. 2000 days of being taken as political hostage by the Australian fascist government on Manus & Nauru island, it's beyond belief,  but is true. Each day has been equal to a lifelong pain.

The prestigious award, selected from a short list of winners in other categories.

The award was announced 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.

Asylum seekers intercepted at sea are sent for “processing” to three camps in PNG and one on the South Pacific island of Nauru, where many have languished for years. They are not allowed to set foot in Australia. 

Mr. Boochani fled Iran , after the police arrested several of his journalist colleagues and raided his office. After the Australian Navy intercepted his boat as he was trying to reach the country, he was sent to Manus Island in 2013.

The detention center, where he wrote the book,  has been shut down after a controversy over its conditions.

“In some ways I am very happy because we are able to get attention to this plight,” Boochani told the BBC. “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 Manus Island detention centers became symbols of Australia’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers at the time Boochani was writing his book. Amnesty International called conditions there “hellish.”

Since Boochani could not be in Australia to receive his prize, his translator, Omid Tofighian accepted the award on his behalf. In 2013, Boochani fled Iran to escape

persecution for his dissident journalism, arriving in Manus just days after a policy to detain all asylum-seekers reaching Australia by boat was introduced. The indefinite nature of his imprisonment means he doesn’t know when he’ll be released. Twelve have died on the island already, many from suspected suicide.

In the process of shutting down the processing centre in 2017, the authorities turned off the water and electricity supply, while 500 refugees – fearful of being abandoned on the island – barricaded themselves in for 22 days. Boochani was one of many who had to dig wells in the earth in search of water.

Boochani writes: ‘If the boat were to split in half by a stray wave, we would perish – gone like all the other absurd deaths that take place. It is wrong to think of our deaths as different from the millions of other humans, different from the deaths of others who have died up until now, from the deaths that have yet to take place.’

The book is prepared with such observations about the way refugees are thought about – using lived experience as a tool to chip away at the anti-migrant social order that institutions like Manus Island Prison seek to entrench.

Husna Rizvi  comments,  ‘First, I understand this book as a piece of art, then as a piece of Australia’s dark history.’