A Kurdish asylum seeker has won one of the most important Australian literature prizes, the Victorian Prize for Literature.
However, Iranian Kurd Behrouz Boochani was unable to accept the award personally in Melbourne because he is being kept on Manus Island.
Boochani won the award, which comes with a monetary prize of 100,000 Australian dollars (approximately $73,000), for his book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. It was written in Farsi while he was held in the now-closed detention centre on the island.
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