Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

admin
Pinned February 5, 2019

<> Embed

@  Email

Report

Uploaded by user
Detainee wins major literary prize for book written through WhatsApp
<> Embed @  Email Report

Detainee wins major literary prize for book written through WhatsApp

Jon Fingas, @jonfingas

February 01, 2019
 

Detainee wins major literary prize for book written through WhatsApp | DeviceDaily.com

 

Messaging apps aren’t just useful for everyday communication — in at least one case, they’ve enabled an influential book. Kurdish-Iranian author Behrouz Boochani has won Australia’s top literary award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, with a book (No Friend But the Mountains) he wrote using WhatsApp. He’d used the unconventional approach to ensure his message would get through. As an inmate of Australia’s controversial Manus Island detention center, he was concerned guards would seize his phone and confiscate his work — he messaged his translator, Omid Trofighian, over the course of five years to ensure his story would get out.

He even helped accept the prize with a video message.

Boochani fled Iran after authorities cracked down on journalists and raided his office. Australia caught him at sea when he was trying to seek asylum in the country and sent him to Manus Island in 2013. He wrote No Friend But the Mountains to document his experience in the detention center, which technically closed in 2017 but left people like Boochani with an uncertain future.

The WhatsApp book hasn’t changed Boochani’s fate, at least not yet. It’s also unlikely to happen very often, since few detainees will have both a smartphone and access to someone on the outside who can translate their work. Even so, it did help raise awareness of conditions that might have gone underreported (or unreported) if the writer had stuck to conventional publishing methods.

Engadget RSS Feed

(21)