Lost and Found at Guantánamo: Mansoor Adayfi and Antonio Aiello with Fatima Bhutto

Join us for a conversation with Mansoor Adayfi and Antonio Aiello with Fatima Bhutto to discuss Don't Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantánamo.

Don't Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantánamo tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp's infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man prisoners nicknamed "Smiley Troublemaker": a student, writer, and historian. While at Guantánamo, he wrote a series of manuscripts he sent as letters to his attorneys, which he then transformed into this vital chronicle, in collaboration with Antonio Aiello. With unexpected warmth and empathy, he unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit. And through his own story, Mansoor also tells Guantánamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth and the people—detainees and guards alike—who lived there with him.

Twenty years after Guantánamo opened, Adayfi helps us understand what actually happened there and how he survived. Adayfi and Aiello are joined by writer and journalist Fatima Bhutto.

Mansoor Adayfi is a writer, advocate, and former Guantánamo detainee, held for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. Adayfi was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of a suspected terrorist. He has published several New York Times pieces, including a "Modern Love" column. He contributed to the graphic anthology Guantanamo Voices and the scholarly volume Witnessing Torture. He participated in the creation of the award-winning radio documentary "The Art of Now: Guantánamo" for BBC radio and the CBC podcast Love Me, which aired on Radiolab. In 2019, Adayfi won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism. He is also one of the Sundance Institute’s 2020 Episodic TV Lab Fellows, through which he is working to bring Don’t Forget Us Here to television.

Antonio Aiello is a writer, editor, and storyteller, formerly the Content and Web Director at PEN America. He worked closely with Mansoor to develop the manuscripts written at Guantánamo into Don’t Forget Us Here. Together, they are working to develop a TV show inspired by the book as Fellows in the Sundance Institute’s prestigious Episodic TV Lab. 

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel, The Runaways (Verso) and the nonfiction reportage about the changing world of global pop culture, New Kings of the World (Columbia Global Reports).