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Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • An urgent tale of survival and subversion
    Economist, *Books of the Year*

About the author

Tahir Hamut Izgil

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.
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