Waiting to Be Arrested at Night A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tahir Hamut Izgil (Author)
Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the foremost poets writing in the Uyghur language. He grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After attending college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and emerged as a prominent film director. His poetry has appeared, in Joshua L. Freeman's English translation, in the New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, and has also been extensively translated into Chinese, Japanese, French and Turkish. He lives near Washington, D.C.
Joshua L. Freeman (Introducer, Translator)
Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of twentieth-century China and a translator of Uyghur poetry. His writing and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. He is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.
<b>An urgent tale of survival and subversion</b>
Economist, *Books of the Year*
Deserves to be read and listened to widely... <b>This is a beautiful read. Izgil’s poetic gaze, and the elegant translation by Joshua L Freeman, together produce a compact, compelling prose that pushes you to keep reading on</b>, even as you blink back tears
Financial Times
<i>S</i>o much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. <b>It is nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of the most terrible genocides of our times</b>
Sunday Times
Izgil's memoir is<b> a story about how to survive</b> in, and to negotiate one's way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. <b>The book's restraint is also its strength</b>
Guardian
<b>I… devoured it in one night. It is a stunning work with its lyrical prose and elegiac translation, a page-turner</b> that stands alongside any thriller for the skill with which it builds tension as a noose tightens round an entire community… Tahir reveals again the banality of evil
i
In the elegant, elliptical poems that appear throughout the text – translated, like the rest of the memoir, with great skill and subtlety by Joshua L. Freeman – <b>Tahir both acknowledges and transforms the worsening political situation. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book is its refreshing lack of political rhetoric</b>: there are no pronouncements on the great evil of the Chinese state. Tahir lets the awful facts speak for themselves
Times Literary Supplement
A heart-wrenching but <b>beautifully written memoir</b>
Daily Telegraph
<b>More than just a memoir... It is also the story of the Uyghur people </b>and the political, social, and cultural destruction of their homeland by the Chinese state
TIME
To call this merely 'a good book' is an understatement - <b>it is essential reading</b>
- Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows,
<b>An outlier among books about human rights. This is in effect a psychological thriller</b>, although the narrative unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare
- Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy,
A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK*
*WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE PRIZE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WRITING 2024*
'Essential reading'
AI WEIWEI, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
'Deserves to be read widely'
FINANCIAL TIMES
As his friends disappeared one by one, it became clear to Tahir Hamut Izgil that fleeing his home in Xinjiang was his family’s only hope.
In this unforgettable story of courage and survival, Tahir charts the Chinese government’s ongoing destruction of the Uyghur community and way of life in spare, gripping, finely tuned prose.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is an urgent call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe, and a moving tribute to those Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tahir Hamut Izgil (Author)
Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the foremost poets writing in the Uyghur language. He grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After attending college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and emerged as a prominent film director. His poetry has appeared, in Joshua L. Freeman's English translation, in the New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, and has also been extensively translated into Chinese, Japanese, French and Turkish. He lives near Washington, D.C.
Joshua L. Freeman (Introducer, Translator)
Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of twentieth-century China and a translator of Uyghur poetry. His writing and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. He is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.