Tag Archives: Micaela Sahhar

2026 NSW Literary Awards night

Posted on 19 May 2026 | 2 comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a NSW Literary Awards Night in person, but I like to give an account of them if I can, based on the video of the streamed event.

If you like, you can skip this blog post and watch the video yourself. (When I watched it, nothing happens for the first 30 minutes.)

If you’re still here (and I hope you are), here’s my version of the evening. (I’ve added only two links to elsewhere in his blog.)

Uncle Brendan Kerin did the Welcome to Country. He addressed the recent Anzac Day booing at the Welcome. He said there were two kinds of people who objected to Welcomes to Country: ignorant people and racists. He’d explain, he said, and if there were still people who objected he’d know which they were, and (he said with a friendly smile) he’d offer further explanation out in the car park after the event. ‘All we’ve ever done is walk with a hand out: come!’ He played a welcome song, urged us to stop calling his instrument a didgeridoo. ‘There are 59 words in language for this instrument, and none of them is didgeridoo,’ he said and then, anticipating a theme of the evening, ‘We’ve lost control of our own narrative.’

The State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon did a Welcome to the Library. Library Council President Bob Debus reminded the audience of Neville Wran’s initial statement of the aims of the awards: to uphold the writer’s place in a free society; to raise and preserve the standards of our literature, and to confirm the community’s respect for a free and flourishing literary culture. He referred explicitly to the book-banning we see in the USA, and obliquely to the disinviting of writers in this country of writers. And he spoke warmly of David Malouf, who won four awards over the decades. The Minister for Arts John Graham reminded us of the ALP’s record as supporter of writers. (A side comment: in the past, Labor Premiers have graced this occasion with their presence, and appeared to be genuinely interested – Neville Wran, Bob Carr, Kristina Keneally, and Nathan Rees come to mind. It’s only recently that the Premier dropped out of the awards’ title.)

James Bradley, in his capacity of Senior Judge, did some more thank yous and contextualising, and then we moved on to the awards.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, Micaela Sahhar (NewSouth Publishing) 

Micaela Sahhar thanked Sweatshop in Western Sydney, and was the first speaker to refer to the genocide in Gaza. In particular she spoke in support of the people who protested at the visit of Isaac Herzog in February this year. As a Palestinian person she thanked people who protest.

Multicultural NSW Award

Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, S. Shakthidharan (Powerhouse Publishing)

‘This book is an act of vulnerability for me,’ he said, and spoke about love across difference as at the heart of multiculturalism. I’m half way through reading this book and am delighted that it won.

Indigenous Writers’ Prize

Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, Natalie Harkin (Wakefield Press)

Natalie Harkin, wearing a ‘Readers and Writers Against Genocide’ T-shirt, described the book as ‘a collaborative mixed media project with many amazing and generous women in my community to document South Australian women’s stories’. She said, ‘There can be no truth-telling in this country without access to our archives and our records,’ and spoke of ‘the strength, the love, the strategic resilience and refusal’ of the women whose words she found in the archives.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Episode 4, Shaun Grant (Curio Pictures, Screen Australia, Amazon MGM Studios)

‘Our baby-sitter fell through and I have a seven-month-old at the back of the auditorium who should probably go to bed,’ Shaun Grant said by way of explaining that he would be brief, and also perhaps explaining why he looked uncomfortable in suit and tie.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting

The Black Woman of Gippsland, Andrea James (Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)

Andrea James said, ‘Theatre-making is very much a collaborative art form.’ And in her thank-yous she demonstrated that First Nations story telling is also very much a collaborative, multi-faceted, relational art form. ‘The cash is going to be great,’ she said, ‘but the biggest prize for me would be the immediate removal or at least reinterpretation of the three memorials to the so-called founder of Gippsland, Angus McMillan, who we actually know as the Butcher of Gippsland.’

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature

Desert Tracks, Marly Wells and Linda Wells (Magabala Books)

The mother and daughter award winners appeared on video link from Alice Springs / Mparntwe. Marly: ‘Colonisation caused and continues to cause chaos for all of us. One of its powerful tools is controlling the narrative, so the more that we can contradict those dominant colonial narratives through truth-telling the better off we’ll all be.’ I love that ‘all’: Linda, Marly’s mother, is non-Indigenous; Marly is Warlpiri.

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature

Gone, Michel Streich (Thames & Hudson Australia)

‘Gone is a story about dying, grief and memory,’ Michel Streich said, ‘and bizarrely … it was almost published posthumously.’ He didn’t elaborate on his near death experience.

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

How To Emerge, Jill Jones (Vagabond Press)

Jill Jones said she’s probably the only person who has been a judge on these awards, has won one of them and has also administered them. About the book, she said, ‘I was wanting to pay attention to both the infinitesimal and the cosmological – I’m quoting some of the words that the judges used about the book, why not? – the resonance between sky, asphalt, weed, wharf, vulnerability and memory and many, many other things.’ And she quoted William Blake.

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction

Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, Clare Wright (Text Publishing)

Clare Wright invoked the Yolŋu name she has been given, meaning ‘special tree’. She spoke of ‘the writing cave, battling the dragon’, and thanked many many people. ‘This is a book about a people speaking truth to power. It’s a story about respect, consultation and consent, values and practices we have seen demolished in recent decisions by publishers, universities and other cultural organisations and boards around First Nations knowledges, cultural representation and freedom of speech.’

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni (Black Inc)

Moreno Giovannoni is mostly a translator. His parents bought him a typewriter when he was 12 because he wanted to be a writer – it took him 51 years to write his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (my blog post here), and another six years to write this one. Migrants are in the news again – this is a book about migrants.

The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award

Rapture, Emily Maguire (Allen & Unwin) – my blog post here

Emily Maguire described the idea for the book as ‘a weird little mediaeval girl pope story’.

Book of the Year

Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, Clare Wright (Text Publishing)

Wearing a Star of David, Clare Wright confessed that though she didn’t expect to win this award she had written something just in case. And the speeches ended as they had begun with a call to stand up for Palestine:

One of the particularly powerful connected elements of Näku Dhäruk is the way it demonstrates how a strong and sovereign Indigenous people resisted the Australian government’s attempt at erasure and silencing of their voice, of their very existential right to belong on and to their land and their law.
The story told in this book through both documentary archival, and eyewitness oral sources also speaks to the potency of allyship, of defending basic human, civil and democratic rights, even when your own quotidian existence is not directly threatened. At this time of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and resultant moves both in Australia and globally to suppress legitimate criticism of the death, dispossession, and destruction of sovereign people, by Palestinians and their allies, the weight and fortune of this book’s dhäruk, its message, could not be more opportune.
As an academic historian, a Jewish Australian, and a human being, I stand here tonight grateful for the opportunity to participate in the global and timeless struggle for justice and equality under the law, resisting the mounting pressure from governments, universities, funding bodies, and publishing companies to stay quiet, timid, and submissive at a time of patent poly crisis.

And it was all over bar the final thanks from the Head Librarian.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers. I thank Uncle Brendan Kerin for explicitly acknowledging non-Indigenous Elders in his Welcome to Country.

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Journal Catch-up 26: Meanjin Winter 2024, and November verse 6

Posted on 12 Nov 2024 | Leave a comment

Esther Anatolitis (ediitor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 2 (Winter 2024)
(links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)

This Meanjin is incredibly rich and varied. I’ve carried it in my backpack for weeks, mostly reading a single article or story at a time when on public transport, in waiting rooms or queues, or occasionally – as in the days before podcasts – while walking. I have learned about:

Click on any link in that list, and you may find something instructive, challenging, entertaining or all three.

As the child of a farmer in North Queensland, where Mamu land has never been ceded and sugarcane monoculture has not been kind to the land, I was particularly moved by Katherine Wilson’s brief memoir about regenerative farming and collaboration with traditional owners, ‘Our Bog Paddock’s Understory‘.

I also want to mention ‘We, small heroes‘ by Micaela Sahhar, a short reflection on what it means in the current era that Palestinian culture has hospitality as a core value.

Of the four excellent pieces of fiction, Katerina Gibson’s ‘Something Dormant‘ stands out as a complex story of young, unrequited love remembered, with an environmental twist.

One of the joys of this Meanjin is the way its nine poems are spread throughout, so each one comes as a pleasant surprise among the prose. Having just this morning read an editorial on ‘eco-poetry’ in the Guardian (poetry ‘cannot ignore global heating’), I’ll single out Caitlin Maling’s ‘Ordinary Disaster‘, a chillingly affectless account of a mass dying of fish among coral in Western Australia.

It’s my blogging custom to focus on page 77. In November, I try to include a verse stanza in each blog post. Page 77 in this issue is part of a fascinating interview with architecture critic Naomi Stead (link here). The phrase that gives me my opening line comes from this paragraph:

I don’t want to be the schoolmarm, but if people understand more about the built environment – how it’s procured, how it comes into being, how it’s not an accident, how there’s almost nothing in our cities that is not deliberately designed – then they can begin to see the role that they themselves could play. I mean we should expect more, we should demand more of our cities and buildings and built environment, but we can only do that with a degree of knowledge and education about how this came to be, and what could be.

Rather than enlarge on Professor Stead’s point, my little verse follows where the phrase takes it. That and the plane that flew over our flat as I typed the first full stop.

November verse 6: We should demand more of our cities
We should demand more of our cities.
Not more aircraft overhead.
No more oh-dears, what-a-pities –
Packer's Pecker, Jeff's Shed.
Perhaps less civil inattention,
less of what's too gross to mention,
neighbours partying till four,
Mormons knocking on the door.

Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney,
Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney, 
give me silence, show me stars,
let me breathe air free from tars.
So many things I'd have you give me.
Make your waters clear again,
and some day soon please change your name

I wrote this blog post on Gade / Wane, not far from Warrane, which some people want to give its name to the whole of Sydney. I acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal Elders past present and emerging, and gratrefully acknowldge their care for this land for millennia.

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Journal Catch-up 23

Posted on 23 May 2024 | Leave a comment

Two more journals in my endless attempt to keep up to date!

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 252 (Spring 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website – I’ve included links)

This Overland‘s editorial describes itself as a ‘second run’. The first run had reflected on the Voice referendum, but as publication came closer – in October last year – ‘the temptation to linger on the politics of symbolic recognition and constitutional reform seems a luxury in the face of escalating violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank’. With feet and throats sore from a solidarity march, the editors draw attention to an essay by Palestinian-Australian writer and historian Micaela Sahhar, ‘which reminds [them] of Overland‘s historic role in indexing Palestine’s survival and resistance’.

Quite apart from its serendipitous relevance, the essay, ‘An idiosyncratic archive: Overland 169 & the Wolstonecroft years‘, is a joy to read, as Sahhar revisits two copies of Overland she acquired in 2002 and 2004. She compares her reading of them then and now, talks of her relationships to people who appeared in them, and generally takes us on a journey into her mind. I love this passage – and so, I assume, do the editors:

As a journal at odds with the mainstream, Overland offered a younger version of me an intellectual place where radical thinking could reside, and a dawning awareness of a community I could take a place in. In this sense, Overland was the tangible expression of a counter to the indifference and invisibility of a young Palestinian woman, the significance of whose identity was rewritten just as she came of age at the time of a catastrophic intellectual nadir represented in 9/11; and a place of refusal against socio-political disengagement and apathy which have been the horsemen of these neo-liberal times.

The other stand-out essay is ‘The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature‘ by Vivian Blaxell, which ranges far and wide, high and low, into memoir and poetry appreciation, circling the subject of beauty. It’s a great read, from which I can’t resist quoting what may be the silliest paragraph, but one that made me laugh:

Australian English is wanton with beautiful. Beauty pops up in not the usual beautiful places there, thereby revealing the radical contingency of beauty itself, probably unintentionally: beautiful, Australians might say of a pork sausage, which seems a surprise at first until you realise that beauty does not exist before we say it exists, for beauty relies entirely on disclosure for its existence. That lucky sausage.

Other essays are a discussion by Peter D Mathews of Sophie Cunningham’s 2004 novel Geography and an idiosyncratic but fascinating essay by πO on concrete poetry in Australia and related matters.

There are five pieces of fiction and nine poems.

Of the poetry, ‘Balloch’ by Eileen Chong stands out for me. An apparently simple poem about a visit to a Scottish loch, it leaves an uncanny aftertaste that only gets richer with further readings.

The fiction covers a wide range, from a celebration of Rotuman culture (I had to look it up) by Dorell Ben to a fantasy of a catastrophic world post climate emergency by Jodie How, with a little social realism by Chloe Hillary and other pieces in between.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 12 (Giramondo 2023)

This may be my last issue of Heat before my subscription expires. Despite having a selection of poems from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a book I’m looking forward to, the journal is a bit of a fizzer for me, though the dominating US presence I’ve complained of in earlier issues is absent, and only one member of Heat‘s editorial advisory board gets a guernsey.

  • You can read Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Redundant‘ on the Heat website. It’s an experimental prose piece in which the experiment seems to consist of not finishing sentences. See what you think.
  • Jordi Infeld’s ‘Poet’s Pocket’ would and indeed does pass for a short essay on sewing and related matters – just a footnote identifying one of its otherwise unremarkable phrases as a quote from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons suggests deeper undercurrents.
  • ‘The Phoenix Apartment’ by Bella Li feels to me like notes towards a larger project.

Items from beyond the Anglosphere are ‘We Shall Be Monsters’, a meditation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Argentinian writer Esther Cross, translated by Alice Whitmore, and six terrific short poems by Iranian Maryam Nazarian, translated by Malaysia-based Arash Kohshsafa. Here’s the first and shortest of the poems, which does wonderful things with an echo of William Carlos Williams’s poem about the plums:

One
I've set the breakfast, the kisses, and the keys on the table.
Please, forgive me
if I find freedom more pleasant than your love.

The most interesting piece is Stephanie Radok’s ‘Inventory 2020’, an impressionistic chronicle of a working artist’s life, made up of mostly very short entries. It reminded me of the late Antigone Kefala’s journals in the way it combined observations of the passing moment with considered reflections and descriptions of the artist’s process. As 2020 was a year when the even tenor of our lives was disrupted by Covid, a narrative emerges. Here’s the entry for 23 February, on page 77*:

23. What you thought was passing/casual was your life. And a particular red purple near a blue hillside that seemed to reflect you.

As for Nam Le’s poems, they seem to be part of a larger whole. I’ll wait for the book.

* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book or journal that coincides with my age.

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Journal Blitz 8b

Posted on 3 Aug 2021 | 3 comments

So much to read, so little time. So many journals, so few subs, and still I can’t keep up.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 238 (Autumn 2020)

Published more than a year ago, this is the first issue of Overland edited by Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk. The new editors swept in not so much with a new broom as with a sandblaster. The regular columns are gone; issues are themed (though judging from a quick look ahead this change only lasted three episodes); and there’s a bold new feel to the design.

It may be part of the new approach, or perhaps it’s teething problems, but I found some of the articles in this issue hard going to the point of being unreadable. Some dispense with sentences as we have known them. Others disappear unapologetically down etymological and literary-history rabbitholes. Yet others drop unexplained references to – I assume – French theorists, with no apparent purpose other than to discourage non-insiders. I tried, I really did, and I’m pretty sure I missed out on some terrific insights, but I just couldn’t finish a number of them. And that’s before I got to John Kinsella’s sequence of poems, ‘Ode to the defenceless: from hypotaxis to parataxis‘, whose prolix obscurity lives up to the promise of its title. I’m not completely sure that some kind of complex leg-pulling isn’t involved, as in the infamous Sokal affair.

This was all the more disappointing because the journal kicks off with a genuinely interesting piece, Toby Fitch’s obituary for British revolutionary socialist poet Sean Bonney (1969–2019), ‘Our Death: Aspects of the radical in Sean Bonney’s last book of poems‘. Toby describes Bonney as having ‘a performative ethics of scathing animosity and nihilistic humour’, and gives the reader plenty of what is needed to grasp the two poems by Bonney that follow his article.

Of the other articles, I want to mention ‘Welcome to the Nakba: notes from the epicentre of an apocalypse‘ by Micaela Sahhar – nakba is Arabic for ‘catastrophe’ and usually refers to the dispossession of Palestinians in the founding of the Israeli state. Writing in the aftermath of the 2019–2020 bushfires, Sahhar offers a startling perspective on Australia’s challenges:

Dear settler-Australia, your Nakba has arrived. Don’t feel helpless, powerless, frustrated, and above all, don’t pray for a miracle. I can tell you from the other side that it will never arrive. It’s time to tackle the structures you made, the structures that will ruin us all.

Poetry and fiction are still a major presence in the new-look journal, and this issue, like its predecessors, includes the results of literary competitions.

The Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, judged by Joshua Mostafa, Margo Lanagan and Hannah Kent, was won by ‘The Houseguest‘ by Jenah Shaw, a story that captures brilliantly the uneasy situation of a young person who has left home in the country to stay with a family in a big city.

The Judith Wright Poetry Prize had three winners, published here with notes from the judges – Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch and Ellen van Neerven, had three winners. Each of these excellent poems left me bemused more than anything else.

Then there are four short stories, which arrive like a reward for persevering: ‘Creek jumping‘ by Cade Turner-Mann, a tiny moment in a rural community that reflects and resists the impact of environmental degradation and colonisation; ‘Mermaid‘ by Gareth Hipwell, a borderline science fiction tale of eco-guilt; ‘Pinches‘ by Emily Barber, an abject tale of sexism; and ‘Urban gods‘ by Cherry Zheng, which could be a starting sketch for a dark fantasy/sci-fi television series.

Jonathan Green (editor), Meanjin Quarterly: The next 80 years, Volume 79 Issue 4 (Summer 2020)

Far from being a new broom, this issue of Meanjin celebrates its continuity with the journal’s past 80 years, reproducing Clem Christensen’s first editorial and featuring short pieces from each of his ten successors in the editorial chair. A powerful narrative emerges of a publication that has managed to survive and thrive in the face of serious challenges, and that has transformed itself many times over to meet the changing times.

Then there’s a stellar line-up of writers, many of them responding to the ‘Next 80 Years’ theme.

Some I need only name for you to get a whiff of their excellence, and timeliness:

  • An email dialogue about time and memory between Behrouz Boochani and Tara June Winch, apparently an excerpt from an ongoing conversation between these two writers
  • An article from Jess Hill on police responses to domestic abuse call-outs – following up a chapter in See What You Made Me Do
  • A scathing piece about the tree-hating official response to the bushfires, by Bruce Pascoe
  • An even more scathing piece by Michael Mohammed Ahmed about White victimhood (starting with the observation that though people complain that it’s racist to name their Whiteness, it was White people who invented the term)
  • A wide-ranging and lucidly angry piece by Raimond Gaita on moral philosophy vs economics in the context of Covid-19.

And that’s only part of it. Of the remaining articles, the standouts for me are ‘Consider The Library’ by Justine Hyde, a wonderful account of the changing roles of public libraries in Australia and elsewhere, including their potential contributions to averting climate catastrophe; ‘More Than Opening The Door’ by Sam Van Zweden, which advocates for inclusion of people with disabilities in Australian literary life, arguing in particular that if a publication commissions a piece on, say, mental health issues from someone who is drawing on their own experience, then the publication needs to consider having a duty of care to the writer; ‘Heading to Somewhere Important’ by Martin Langford, a brief account of the changing face of Australian poetry over the last 80 years – an impossible task acquitted with grace; and Nicola Redhouse’s ‘Future Tense’, which engages with Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, in ways that are probably crucial to making that ‘intimidatingly thick opus’ as accessible and influential as we all need it to be.

Scattered like jewels through the pages are poems from David Brooks, Kim Cheng Boey, Eileen Chong, Sarah Day, Jill Jones, David McCooey, and more. If you count two pieces labelled ‘memoir’ that look back from the year 2200, there are six short stories, which project a range of pretty depressing futures. My pick of them would be Tara Moss’s The Immortality Project, where being able bodied is seen as indicating deficiency, and uploading one’s consciousness to Another Place leads to an interesting twist on the expected outcome.

Decades ago, I was a keen subscriber to Meanjin, and in my mid twenties I bought a swag of back copies (from Kylie Tennant, as it happens, whom her husband L C Rodd described to me over the phone as ‘an extinct volcano of Australian literature’). I loved my collection and browsed in it often, but sold it and let my sub lapse when space and time shrank around me with parenthood and a job that required a lot of reading. When I considered resubscribing some time ago, I was deterred by the tiny type – as noted on my blog, here. Someone gave me this issue as a Christmas present, and it seems very likely that I’ll resubscribe.

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