Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China's internment camps for Muslim minorities.

Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labour camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government's radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. When he noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbours had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. It soon became clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

©2023 Tahir Hamut Izgil (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Deserves to be read and listened to widely… This is a beautiful read. Izgil’s poetic gaze, and the elegant translation by Joshua L Freeman, together produce a compact, compelling prose that pushes you to keep reading on, even as you blink back tears.

    Financial Times

  • Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is so much more than a thrilling account of a great escape. It is nothing less than a call to the West not to look away from one of the most terrible genocides of our times

    Sunday Times

  • A heart-wrenching but beautifully written memoir

    Daily Telegraph

  • Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book’s restraint is also its strength.

    Guardian

  • Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is an outlier among books about human rights. This is in effect a psychological thriller, although the narrative unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare

    New York Times

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