Former Manus Island detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani has had his claim for asylum accepted by New Zealand and has been granted a visa to stay in the country.
He can now live and work in New Zealand.
The Kurdish-Iranian journalist spent six years in detention in Papua New Guinea as he awaited processing for his asylum request after attempting to enter Australia by boat in 2013.
He gained worldwide attention in 2019 after his book, No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia’s richest literature prize.
He was granted a one-month visa to speak at a literary festival in Christchurch in November last year and made an application for asylum in New Zealand shortly afterwards.
Mr Boochani was notified by New Zealand’s government that his claim for asylum had been accepted on Thursday, exactly seven years to the day after his arrival in Australia in 2013.
Following the closure of the Manus Island centre in 2017, Boochani and his fellow detainees were moved to refugee transit centres near the island’s main town of Lorengau, and later, to the country’s capital Port Moresby.
Mr Boochani’s 374-page book, detailing his experiences in detention, was written in secret and was smuggled out of the detention centre via hundreds of text messages to his translators and editors in Australia.
-More to come
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