This is Mark Hill. He was an officer in the Iranian army during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). He spent years trying to escape; at one stage he was double-crossed by a contact whom he had paid thousands of pounds to smuggle him into Turkey. Mark, who more recently anglicised his name, spent months in solitary confinement in a camp in Iraq where he could hear people being tortured. For up to five days he was kept in a tiny space where he could not sit down or stand fully.
A couple of weeks ago in north London I met him and other torture survivors who take part in a creative writing course as part of the therapy provided to them by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Torture, which I visited a couple of years ago when it moved to a new building.
I wrote a story about meeting the group and a new website, Lots of Big Ideas, which is seeking to be a platform for their work and a hub for similar voices from around the world. I hope it is a great success and that some of them can develop their writing and perhaps write political comment articles about the regimes they have such terrible experiences of.
I was a bit of a one man media band (a sign of the future) when I met the Write for Life people, and did a report on GU's Newsdesk podcast, which you can listen to here (it is about 17 mins in). I also took photographs of Mark and a couple of the other writers; I'm quite proud of the one of Mark - I was fortunate to have such interesting people to take photographs of. I read a pamphlet of their work and some of it was very good and invariably powerful. Mark has written two novels and a screenplay and I was really moved by his ambition and sense of purpose; and the other two writers I spoke to, Faraidon and Hassan, also seemed really talented.
Recent Comments