Michael Mohammed Ahmad & Omar Sakr

Join Michael Mohammed Ahmad, author of the Miles Franklin Award-shortlisted The Lebs, and Omar Sakr, author of The Lost Arabs, who together will discuss the new wave of Lebanese-Australian novels and poetry from Western Sydney. 

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All the authors' books will be available to purchase and get signed on the day. 

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About the Books

The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmed is a confronting and completely outstanding novel from award winning Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Michael Mohammed Ahmad. It has been shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2019 NSW Premiers Literary Awards Multicultural Award. 

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Visceral  and energetic, Omar Sakr’s poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a seething, urgent collection from a distinctive new voice. 

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Revered writer and poet David Malouf said of Omar's work: "The new and powerful voice, public, performative, but also vulnerably intimate, of one of our 'children of elsewhere'."  

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About Michael Mohammed Ahmad 

Michael Mohammed Ahmad is an Arab-Australian writer, editor, teacher and community arts worker. He is the founder and director of Sweatshop, a literacy movement in Western Sydney devoted to empowering culturally and  linguistically diverse artists through creative writing. 

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Mohammed's essays and short stories have appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, The Guardian, Heat, Seizure, The Lifted Brow, The Australian and Coming of Age: Australian Muslim Stories. His debut novel, The Tribe, received a 2015 Sydney Morning Herald  Best Young Australian Novelists of the Year Award. Mohammed received  his Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University in 2017.

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About Omar Sakr

Omar Sakr is an award-winning poet born and raised in Western Sydney  to Lebanese Muslim and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (2017), a collection of poetry shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and The Lost Arabs (2019). Omar’s poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, featuring most recently in Prairie Schooner, The Margins, Tinderbox, Wildness, Peril, Circulo de Poesía, Overland, Meanjin, and Antic, among others. He has also been anthologised in Best Australian Poems 2016, and in Contemporary Australian Poetry.

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Omar placed runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and  Emerging Poets (2016), and has been shortlisted for Cosmonaut Avenue’s  Creative Nonfiction Prize (2017), the Fair Australia Poetry Prize  (2016), the Story Wine Prize (2015), and the ACU Poetry Prize (2015).  Elsewhere, his articles and essays have appeared in The Saturday  Paper, The Guardian,The Sydney Morning Herald, Archer, Meanjin, Kill  Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, SBS Online, SBS Life, SBS Comedy,  The Wheeler Centre, and Junkee.