The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title: Somewhere Else

Tahir Hamut Izgil is a modernist Uyghur poet and filmmaker. He grew up in Kashgar and, after attending college in Beijing, returned to the Uyghur region, where he emerged as a film director. Read LessHis writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and has been translated into Japanese, Turkish, French, and Swedish. In 2017, as the Chinese government began the mass internment of Uyghurs, Izgil fled to the United States with his family. His memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night (2023), has been translated into more than a dozen languages and received the 2023 NBCC John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and the 2024 Moore Prize for human rights writing. He also received the 2024 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent and the 2024 Swedish Cicada Prize. Izgil now lives near Washington, D.C.