Overview

A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history '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.

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9781529922752

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Reviews

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 * To call this merely 'a good book' is an understatement - it is essential reading -- Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows 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 * 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 * New York Times * A vital and urgent book about the tragedy of the Uyghur people, abandoned by the world and brutally oppressed by the Chinese government. The voice of Tahir Hamut Izgil is one that must be heard -- Janine di Giovanni, author of The Morning They Came for Us

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 *

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 * To call this merely 'a good book' is an understatement - it is essential reading -- Ai Weiwei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows 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 * 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

Author Information

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.

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