"My friends were arrested, or simply disappeared"

Tahir Izgil is one of the most highly respected living Uyghur poets. Tahir was born near Kashgar, in Xinjiang province, and from an early age he was immersed in the poetry of his culture. When the Chinese state clamped down on the Uyghur community, he lived under constant threat of arrest, and says he couldn’t even perform his poems. So he decided to try and escape his homeland.

Tahir has a memoir out about his experiences called Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua Freeman.

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar
Producer: Harry Graham
Editor: Andrea Kennedy