[custom_adv] In some ways, the fact that Behrouz Boochani touched down in New Zealand on his way to a literary festival is unremarkable. His memoir, No Friend but the Mountains, won Australia's richest literary prize earlier this year, after all, and presenting at such festivals is a pretty standard item on any celebrated writer's itinerary. [custom_adv] But this trip represented something unfamiliar for the Kurdish-Iranian journalist: his first glimpse of freedom in six years. [custom_adv] Boochani, 35, fled security forces in — first for Indonesia and then Australia, where he sought asylum as a refugee. But he never made it to the Australian mainland. [custom_adv] Instead, he has been held since 2013 in an offshore detention facility based on Papua New Guinea, along with hundreds of other asylum-seekers. [custom_adv] It was there that he wrote his prize-winning memoir in a series of WhatsApp messages, which he composed in Farsi and sent to a translator to organize. [custom_adv] And it was there that he had to record his acceptance speech for the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, unable to accept the award in person. [custom_adv] Now, after obtaining a visitor visa to New Zealand and permission to leave Papua New Guinea for the first time, Boochani says he will never go back.