CURRENT AFFAIRS

Detailed explanation-1: -Manus Island refugee Behrouz Boochani wins Australian literary prize. A refugee stuck on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island has won Australia’s richest literary prize for a book he wrote in detention.

Detailed explanation-2: -Boochani was locked up in offshore detention for six years, during which he wrote and published the award-winning No Friend But the Mountains. He eventually settled in New Zealand.

Detailed explanation-3: -Boochani, 35, fled security forces in Iran - first for Indonesia and then Australia, where he sought asylum as a refugee. But he never made it to the Australian mainland. Instead, he has been held since 2013 in an offshore detention facility based on Papua New Guinea, along with hundreds of other asylum-seekers.

Detailed explanation-4: -At the National Biography award, which was presented on Monday morning at the State Library of NSW, the judges’ praised Boochani’s book as “profoundly important, an astonishing act of witness and testament to the lifesaving power of writing as resistance”.

Detailed explanation-5: -Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish Iranian writer, journalist and human rights defender. He was born on 23 July 1983 in Ilam city in Kurdistan west of Iran. Behrouz left Iran in May 2013 because of his work.