Canbury Press lands first memoir by Uyghur survivor of China’s 're-education' camps

Canbury Press has landed the first memoir by a Uyghur survivor of China’s "re-education" camps.

Martin Hickman, m.d., acquired non-US world English rights for How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp from Elisa Rodriguez at Humensis in Paris, which owns French publishers Editions des Equateurs. US rights went to Seven Stories in New York. The book will publish during the Beijing Winter Olympics next month, on 3rd February.

It tells the real story of author Gulbahar Haitiwaji, who vanished for three years in China’s western desert after being tricked into leaving her adopted France. It has been co-written by Rozenn Morgat, a journalist with Le Figaro, and was previously published in France under the title Rescapée du Goulag Chinois (Survivor of the Chinese Gulag).

Canbury Press said: "She constantly feared death as she was subjected to a prison regime of daily brainwashing, given memory-eroding pills and forcibly sterilised. Her book gives both a powerful personal narrative and the bigger picture about what is happening to the mostly Muslim Uyghur people in China’s border province of Xinjiang."

Since 2017, one million Uyghurs have been interned, in what Beijing says is a crackdown on Islamic extremism. The US officially categorises China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as a “genocide”. The US, the UK, Canada and Australia are staging a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games in protest at China’s human rights violations.

Canbury Press is urging the book trade to enjoy its right to freedom of expression and back How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp. A publicity campaign will accompany its worldwide release.

Hickman said: “Whatever you think of the way we are governed in Britain, and the West, we are hugely fortunate to live in a free society. The Uyghurs in China aren’t so lucky. One of the world’s superpowers is using a variety of tactics, including the latest DNA technology and a covert network of remote jails, to wipe an entire culture off the face of the Earth.

“Gulbahar’s gripping and intimate memoir reveals a compelling human angle to this global issue. It is the story of what happens when an authoritarian state decides to crush an ordinary woman – and how she fights back. With its secret police and jails and pervasive surveillance, it reads like a 21st-Century version of 1984.”