Behrouz Boochani is one of Australia’s most-celebrated contemporary writers. Last week, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist won a A$25,000 (£14,000) national biography award for No Friend but the Mountains, a book judges described as “profoundly important”. It wasn’t the first prize the book had received in Australia: it has now won the Victorian Premier’s Literary award, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary award and the Australian Book Industry’s non-fiction book of the year.

One critic described it as a “masterpiece,” another called it “the standout book of the year” and another, novelist Michelle de Kretser, said it was “lucid, poetic and devastating”.

Boochani has addressed huge crowds at writing festivals across the country, but he has never attended any in person, nor been able to collect any of the awards.

That’s because Boochani is being held on Manus Island, in the Pacific Ocean north of Papua New Guinea, at a detention centre for refugees created by the Australian government. “I think history will judge this generation,” he said via WhatsApp at the biography award ceremony, “and will judge all of us in this hard and dark period of Australian history.”

No Friend but the Mountains chronicles Boochani’s life after the boat he travelled on from Indonesia sank in the Timor Sea. Like all asylum seekers intercepted by Australian authorities as they attempt to travel to the country, he was immediately incarcerated, first on Christmas Island, about 2,000 miles off the north-west coast of Australia, and later on Manus.

He wrote his book using a smuggled mobile phone, texting the prose paragraph by paragraph to friends overseas.

The book documents the systematic dehumanisation practised in the facility he calls “Manus prison”, beginning with the replacement of his name with a number. “Slowly but surely I must get used to that number,” he writes. “From their perspective, we are nothing more than numbers. I will have to forget about my name.”

Boochani describes the squalor and despair engendered by the camp’s decrepit infrastructure. “I am a piece of meat thrown into an unknown land, a prison of filth and heat.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Behrouz Boochani, centre, at a local market on Manus Island. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/The Guardian

The narrative culminates in the killing in 2014 of his friend Reza Barati, one of the many deaths in Australian facilities. Writing for the Guardian last year, Boochani said: “The way he was killed, and the violence that left him dead, more than anything else, echoes the level of ruthlessness inherent to the system of offshore processing.”

Papua New Guinea’s hosting of the Australian detention centre was the result of a 2012 agreement between Australia’s Labor prime minister Julia Gillard and PNG’s prime minister Peter O’Neill. In 2013, the next Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd , while lagging in the polls, announced that anyone arriving in Australia illegally by boat would be detained on Manus. Even if they proved to be “genuine refugees”, they would have “no chance” of coming to Australia but would be instead resettled in Papua New Guinea.

Australia, the dominant regional power, exerted its political and financial sway over its poorer neighbour to make the deal happen. As Papua New Guinea MP Belden Namah later complained, the Papua New Guinea government essentially “amended the constitution to accommodate another foreign country’s domestic policy interest”.

In 2017, when the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull tried to persuade Donald Trump to honour a deal struck with Barack Obama to resettle the refugees detained in Australia’s offshore facilities in the US, Trump quizzed his counterpart on what the logic of the scheme was. “It is not because they are bad people. It is because in order to stop people smugglers, we had to deprive them of the product. So we said if you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Nobel Prize-winning genius, we will not let you in,” said Turnbull. Trump was impressed. “That is a good idea. We should do that too,” he mused, before adding: “You are worse than I am.”

In his book, Boochani drew on a deep knowledge of Iranian and Kurdish traditions to produce a text that is avowedly – almost defiantly – literary, documenting banal, routinised brutality in a combination of poetry and poetic prose.

But he also attempted to theorise the meaning of refugee detention through the concept of “kyriarchy”, a feminist term referring to the intersection of different oppressions.

Manus detention centre, Boochani says, operates as a “kyriarchical system”, in which detainees are set against each other and eventually destroyed. Yet, because of its very extremity, it provides a privileged position from which to recognise how the logic of border policing divides and victimises the oppressed throughout the western world.

Many of the refugees still in Papua New Guinea have been resettled. But hundreds – including Boochani – remain in limbo, uncertain if or when they will ever leave.

Through social-media and Skype addresses at literary festivals and other events, Boochani has become a powerful advocate for those trapped on Manus – a desperate population gripped by an epidemic of self-harm.

“I have been in a cage for years but throughout this time my mind has always been producing words, and these words have taken me across borders, taken me overseas and to unknown places,” he said in January via video link from Manus as he accepted the Victorian Premier’s award. “I truly believe words are more powerful than the fences of this place, this prison.”

Extract from ‘No Friend but the Mountains’

On rainy days the island has a different colour and fragrance

When the rain pours down there is no sign of mosquitoes

When it rains, one doesn’t feel the heat that drenches bodies in sweat

The Flowers Resembling Chamomile

Dancing incessantly

Breathing heavily

Gasping as though in love with the cool ocean breeze

I love those flowers

A zeal for resistance

A tremendous will for life bursting out from the coils and curves of the stems

Bodies stretching out to reveal themselves for all to witness.