If you took an Uber in Washington DC a few years ago, there’s a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets, and one of only a handful from his minority Muslim community to escape the genocide being visited upon his homeland in western China. A successful filmmaker, innovative poet and prominent intellectual, Tahir Hamut Izgil had long been acquainted with state surveillance and violence, having spent three years in a labour camp on fabricated charges. But in 2017, the Chinese government’s repression of its Uyghur citizens assumed a terrifying new intensity. As Izgil’s friends disappeared one by one, it became clear that fleeing the country was his family’s only hope. Escape to America spared Izgil’s family the internment camps that have swallowed over a million Uyghurs. It also allowed this rare personal testimony of the Xinjiang genocide to reach the wider world.

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