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. Izgil’s poetry has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders and Berkeley Poetry Review, and has also been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and French. In 2017, as the Chinese government began the mass internment of the Uyghur people, Izgil fled with his family to the United States. His new book, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, published in September, 2023. This book won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. Izgil received the 2024 Vaslav Havel international prize for creative dissent. He also received the Swedish literary award Cikada prize. Izgil received the 2024 Moore Prize for human rights writing.
