Spotlight – September 2019

IN THE SPOTLIGHT 9/2019 Spotlight 9

AUSTRALIA

Free, but only

to write

EASY

A man who is not allowed into Australia
has recently won the country’s highest
literary prize. Behrouz Boochani, 35, is
a journalist and an asylum seeker from
Iran. He arrived in Australia in 2013 and
has been detained since then on Manus
Island, in Papua New Guinea.
While living in a detention centre, he
has written for The Guardian newspaper
about life on Manus, and used his mo-
bile phone to co-direct the documentary
film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time. He also
wrote the book No Friend but the Mountains:
Writing from Manus Prison. The book has
won this year’s A$100,000 Victorian Prize
for Literature. Boochani told the BBC he
hopes it shows people that “we are not an-
gels and we are not evil. We are humans”.

asylum seeker
[E(saIlEm )si:kE]
, Asylbewerber(in)

detain [di(teIn]
, festnehmen, verhaften

detention centre

[di(tenS&n )sentE]

, Auffanglager für

Flüchtlinge

WHO EXACTLY IS...

Tom Felton?

EASY

Tom Felton was born on 22 Sep-

tember 1987 in Epsom, Eng-

land, the youngest in a family

of four children. He began his

acting career in the film The Bor-

rowers at the age of ten. But he

became an international star as

the villain Draco Malfoy in the

Harry Potter series. He received

MTV’s Best Villain Award twice, in

2009 and 2010, for the role of Mal-

foy. More recently, Felton acted in

the TV series The Flash, about the

battles of a crime-fighting super-

hero. Felton also enjoys songwrit-

ing. He says Paul McCartney is an

inspiration, telling Seventeen maga-

zine: “I’d love to pick up a guitar and

write songs like he does. Or to expe-

rience what it might have been like

to be a Beatle for a day.”

Felton has created a music web-

site, feltbeats.com, which features

more than a dozen of his own songs.

His other interests include competi-

tive carp fishing.

competitive carp

fishing [kEm)petEtIv

(kA:p )fISIN]

, Karpfen-

Wettangeln

villain [(vIlEn]

, Bösewicht

Texts by Talitha Linehan, Melina Tauber and Claudine Weber-Hof

A prize-winning

book written by

a refugee while in

detention