TUESDAY 29 OCTOBER 2024 | IN STORE EVENT

6pm for a 6.30pm start | 60 mins

Join us for the launch of Samah Sabawi's Cactus Pear For My Beloved.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Cactus Pear For My Beloved is the story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.

Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands.

Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samah Sabawi is an author, playwright and poet and a recipient of multiple awards both nationally and internationally. Her theatre credits include the critically acclaimed and award-winning plays Tales of a City by the Sea and THEM. In 2020 Samah received the prestigious Green Room Award for Best Writing in the independent theatre category, and was shortlisted for both the NSW and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

With Stephen Orlo Samah edited the anthology Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, winner of the Patrick O’Neill Award and she co-authored I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso, edited by Vacy Vlazna, winner of the Palestine Book Award. Samah received a Doctor of Philosophy from Victoria University for her thesis titled Inheriting Exile, transgenerational trauma and the Palestinian Australian Identity.