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.
An urgent tale of survival and subversion
*Economist, *Books of the Year**
Deserves to be read and listened to widely... 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, even as you blink back tears
*Financial Times*
So much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. It is
nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of
the most terrible genocides of our times
*Sunday Times*
Izgil's memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate
one's way through, a society in which repression has become
routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book's
restraint is also its strength
*Guardian*
I… devoured it in one night. It is a stunning work with its lyrical
prose and elegiac translation, a page-turner 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 – 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: 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 beautifully written memoir
*Daily Telegraph*
More than just a memoir... It is also the story of the Uyghur
people 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 - it is
essential reading
*Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows*
An outlier among books about human rights. This is in effect a
psychological thriller, although the narrative unfolds like a
classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a
nightmare
*Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy*
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