Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

<p><b>A Uyghur poet's piercing memoir </b><b>of life under the most coercive surveillance regime in history</b><br><br><b>'Essential' AI WEIWEI<br>'Deeply courageous' PHILIPPE SANDS<br>'A wake-up call' TRACY K. SMITH</b><br><br>If you took an Uber in Washington DC a few years ago there's a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets and one of only a handful from his minority Muslim community to escape the genocide being visited upon his homeland in western China.<br><br>A successful filmmaker innovative poet and prominent intellectual Tahir Hamut Izgil had long been acquainted with state surveillance and violence having spent three years in a labour camp on fabricated charges.<br><br>But in 2017 the Chinese government's repression of its Uyghur citizens assumed a terrifying new intensity: critics were silenced; conversations became hushed; passports were confiscated; and Uyghurs were forced to provide DNA samples and biometric data.<br><br>As Izgil's friends disappeared one by one it became clear that fleeing the country was his family's only hope.<br><br>Escape to America spared Izgil's family the internment camps that have swallowed over a million Uyghurs. It also allowed this rare personal testimony of the Xinjiang genocide to reach the wider world.<br><br><i>Waiting to Be Arrested at Night</i> charts the ongoing destruction of a community and a way of life. It is a call for the world to awaken to a humanitarian catastrophe an unforgettable story of courage escape and survival and a moving tribute to Izgil's friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.</p>