The Moore Prize 

Video Archive

The Moore Prize 2022 Winner for Writing on Human Rights 

Nury Turkel -  No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs

Nury Turkel was born in a ‘re-education’ camp in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He spent the first several months of his life in captivity with his mother, who was beaten and starved while pregnant with him, whilst his father served a penal sentence in an agricultural labour camp. Following this traumatic start – and not without a heavy dose of good fortune – he was later able to travel to the US for his undergraduate studies in 1995 and was granted asylum in the country in 1998 where, as a lawyer, he is now a tireless and renowned activist for the plight of his people.

Part memoir, part call-to-action, No Escape will be the first major book to tell the story of the Chinese government’s terrible oppression of the Uyghur people from the inside, detailing the labour camps, ethnic and religious oppression, forced sterilisation of women and the surveillance tech that have made Xinjiang – in the words of one Uyghur who managed to flee – ‘a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known’.

Interviewed by 2022 Moore Prize Jury Chair Bidisha Mamata

Bidisha Mamata is a broadcaster, journalist and multimedia artist. She specialises in international human rights, social justice and the arts and offers political analysis, arts critique and cultural diplomacy tying these interests together. She writes for the main UK broadsheets and presents and commentates heavily for BBC TV and radio, ITN, CNN, ViacomCBS and Sky News. Her fifth book,  Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015), is based on her outreach work in UK prisons, refugee charities and detention centres. Her first short film, An Impossible Poison, received its London premier in 2018 and has been highly acclaimed and selected for numerous international film festivals. Her latest film series, Aurora, launched in 2020 and is ongoing. She is currently presenting the Hello Happiness audio series for Wellcome Collection, all about mental and physical health.