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Kurdish refugee author Behrouz Boochani arrives in New Zealand

Kurdish refugee author Behrouz Boochani arrives in New Zealand
posted onNovember 15, 2019
nocomment

A Kurdish Asylum seeker, who wrote a famous book from inside a detention center, has finally left Australia on Thursday after more than six years to New Zealand.

Behrouz Boochani, from the Kurdish city of Mariwan in Iran, left the country to avoid state’s punishment for his journalism, but end up in a refugee detention camp in Papua New Guinea island for more than six years.

"I have been invited by Word Festival in Christchurch and will participate in an event here. Thank you to all the friends who made this happen," he tweeted after arriving in New Zealand.

Boochani has also declared that he would never go back to Australia or Papua New Guinea.

On January 2019, he told BBC English "I didn't want to go to prison in Iran so I left and when I got to Australia they put me in this prison for years."

“From New Zealand, he hopes to travel to the US, where he has been accepted for asylum as part of a deal to resettle refugees from Australia's two offshore detention centres. If this is now denied because of his arrival in New Zealand, he has said he will look at other options,” BBC English reported on Thursday.

As an asylum seeker Boochani became one of the Island's most well-known voices, reporting the lives of his fellow asylum seekers and publishing his award-winning book No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison in 2018.