Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish journalist and writer who fled from Iran to try to seek asylum in Australia. En route, after a frightening boat trip from Indonesia, he was intercepted and eventually transferred to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea where he has been incarcerated for the past five years. At the beginning of August, he published a book to provide a testimony of his own experience and that of other asylum seekers. No Friend But the Mountain defies an easy categorisation, mixing fiction and non fiction and written “with the lyricism of a poet, the literary skills of a novelist and the profound insights of an astute observer of human behaviour”.

Eastside Radio’s Mick Paddon interviewed Behrouz Boochani about his revelatory and very personal new book on the day it was published in Australia. Though the nearly 400 page book was produced in extraordinary circumstances, thumbed on a phone and sent as thousands of text messages in Farsi to a translator in Australia, Behrouz Boochani makes it clear he wants it to be read and understood as a piece of writing; a work of art. It was written, not as a bid for freedom, but to provide an account and a testimony for others to make up there minds. The interview, first broadcast during Eric Gyors Wednesday Drive show on August 8th , 2018, is now available as an Eastside Radio Podcast