Mansoor Adayfi

Mansoor Adayfi is a writer, advocate, and former Guantanamo Bay detainee, held for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. Adayfi was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggled 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 wrote the introduction to the 2017-2018 exhibit, "Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantanamo Bay," and contributed to the scholarly volume, Witnessing Torture. His graphic narrative, "Caged Lives" was published by The Nib and is included in the anthology Guantanamo Voices. He participated in the creation of the award-winning radio documentary "The Art of Now: Guantanamo" for BBC radio and the CBC podcast Love Me, which aired on NPR's Snap Judgment. 

Regularly interviewed by international news media about his experiences at Guantanamo and life after, he has been featured in the PBS Frontline episode Out of Gitmo. In 2019, he won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism. He is also one of the Sundance Institutes 2019 Episodic Lab Fellows, through which he is working to bring his debut — Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo (Hachette, 2021) — to television.