About Sara Saleh

Sara M Saleh is a writer, human rights lawyer, organiser, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published widely in English and Arabic in Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Red Room, Kill Your Darlings, Rabbit Poetry Journal, SBS, and in anthologies the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, Racism, Making Mirrors, Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word, A Blade of Grass, Groundswell: The Best of Australian Poetry, Borderless: a transnational anthology of feminist poetry, and Another Australia. She is co-editor of the groundbreaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity.

Sara has run poetry workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country, and has performed nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency, and Amant New York writers residency. Her latest collaborative project, Muslim Poetry Project: Retreat and Anthology, is underway. She made history as the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. Her debut novel SONGS FOR THE DEAD AND THE LIVING (Affirm Press) and a full-length poetry collection, THE FLIRTATION OF GIRLS (UQP), are both out in 2023.

Sara recently completed her Juris Doctor, her research concentrating on human rights and international humanitarian law, police accountability, the prison industrial complex, and the incarceration/detention of marginalised populations. 

 

She is based on Bidjigal land with her partner and their cats, Cappy & Lola.