Tahir Hamut Izgil is a foremost contemporary Uyghur poet, filmmaker, and writer, originally from Kashgar, the cultural heart of the Uyghur homeland. After earning his degree from Minzu University of China in Beijing, he became a prominent film director in the region. He also contributed significantly to Uyghur literature through his published poetry collections, literary critiques, and translations of Western critical theory.
Izgil also served as an adjunct professor at the Xinjiang Arts Institute, teaching film and documentary directing. In 2017, as the Chinese government escalated its mass internment campaign against the Uyghur people, Izgil and his family fled to the United States.
His memoir, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide (published in 2023), has garnered significant international acclaim, winning the NBCC John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing. It was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and TIME. Izgil’s work has appeared in leading publications globally, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Granta, and The Atlantic, and has been translated into nearly twenty languages. He is also a recipient of the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent and the Swedish Cicada Prize for Poetry (2024).