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Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

Tahir Hamut Izgil author Joshua L Freeman translator Joshua L Freeman editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:1st Aug '24

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Waiting to Be Arrested at Night cover

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.

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 *

ISBN: 9781529922752

Dimensions: 197mm x 129mm x 16mm

Weight: 196g

272 pages