Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history *LITHUB'S #1 BEST-REVIEWED NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023* *A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023* *AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023* 'Essential reading' AI WEIWEI, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows 'Deserves to be read widely... Beautiful' FINANCIAL TIMES If you took an Uber in Washington DC a few years ago, there's a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets, and one of only a handful from his minority Muslim community to escape the genocide being visited upon his homeland in western China. A successful filmmaker, innovative poet and prominent intellectual, Tahir Hamut Izgil had long been acquainted with state surveillance and violence, having spent three years in a labour camp on fabricated charges. But in 2017, the Chinese government's repression of its Uyghur citizens assumed a terrifying new intensity: critics were silenced; conversations became hushed; passports were confiscated; and Uyghurs were forced to provide DNA samples and biometric data. As Izgil's friends disappeared one by one, it became clear that fleeing the country was his family's only hope. Escape to America spared Izgil's family the internment camps that have swallowed over a million Uyghurs. It also allowed this rare personal testimony of the Xinjiang genocide to reach the wider world. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night charts the ongoing destruction of a community and a way of life. It is a call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe, an unforgettable story of courage, escape and survival, and a moving tribute to Izgil's friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

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.