Behrouz Boochani
Writer, Journalist, Scholar, Cultural Advocate
and Film-maker

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. Boochani was a writer and editor for the Kurdish language magazine Werya in Iran. He is a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck Law School; Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Honorary Member of PEN International; and winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award for journalism. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time; and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh’s play Manus. His book, No Friend but The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature in addition to the Nonfiction category. He has also won the Special Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Australian Book Industry Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and the National Biography Prize.

 @BehrouzBoochani
 @BehrouzBoochaniJournalist
 Behrouz Boochani 'The Guardian' Articles

Photo Credit: Behrouz Boochani, Photographer: Ehsan K Hazaveh

Dr Omid Tofighian (Introduction)
Editor: Freedom, Only Freedom

Dr Omid Tofighian is Adjunct Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales; and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck Law, University of London. He is an award-winning lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in citizen media, popular culture, displacement and discrimination.

His publications include Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016); translation of Behrouz Boochani's multi-award-winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018); co-editor of special issues for journals Literature and Aesthetics (2011), Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (2019) and Southerly (2021); and co-translator/co-editor of Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani (Bloomsbury 2023).

 The Guardian, Article: Writing from Manus prison: a scathing critique of domination and oppression

Moones Mansoubi
Editor: Freedom, Only Freedom

Moones Mansoubi is a community, arts and cultural development worker based in Sydney, Australia. Her work is dedicated mainly to supporting and collaborating with migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia. She has managed numerous community and cultural projects and was the first translator of Behrouz Boochani’s work when he began writing from Manus Island.

She was translation consultant for Boochani’s book No Friend but the Mountains (Picador, 2018). She works with various news outlet and journals as an author, contributor and translator.  Her translation of the article ‘An Island off Manus’ (The Saturday Paper, 6 May 2017) was included in Boochani’s winning nomination for an Amnesty International Australia Media Award in 2017. She has a Master’s in International Relations and is passionate about social justice and social cohesion. She is currently coordinator of the Community Refugee Welcome Centre in Inner West Sydney and a producer for SBS Radio, Persian program.

 @Moones_M

Professor Peter Greste
Film Maker, Journalist, Author and
Professor Of Journalism, Macquarie University 

Professor Peter Greste is an academic, film maker, journalist, and author. He is currently professor of journalism at Macquarie University. He came to academia in 2018 after a 30-year career as an award-winning foreign correspondent for the BBC, Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera, in some of the world’s most volatile places. From Afghanistan, to Latin American, Africa and the Middle East, he has reported from the frontlines and beyond.

In 2011, he won a Peabody Award for a documentary on Somalia, Land of Anarchy, for the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, Panorama. He is best known for becoming a headline himself, when he and two of his colleagues were arrested in Cairo while working for Al Jazeera, and charged with terrorism offences. In letters smuggled from prison, he described the arrests as an attack on media freedom. The letters helped launch a global campaign that eventually got them released after more than 400 days in prison. His struggle helped earn him numerous awards including from the British Royal Television Society, the Walkley Foundation, the RSL, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the International Association of Press Clubs.

In 2017, with two colleagues, he established the advocacy group, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom which actively campaigns for media freedom across Australia and the Asia Pacific region. As an academic, he leads a research program investigating the impact of national security legislation on public interest journalism. Peter is the author of The First Casualty about his experiences in Egypt, and the wider war on journalism.

 @PeterGreste