AustLit

'Sara M. Saleh is a writer and human rights lawyer. She has won two of Australia’s most prestigious poetry prizes: Overland’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2020 and Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize  in 2021. She has published extensively in literary and poetry journals, and co-edited Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity with Randa Abdel-Fattah.' (Introduction)

'The Other Half of You isn’t written just for all the readers out there who get what it’s like to be the child of migrant parents. It’s not just written for those who know already what it’s like to deal with growing up in a home where the culture on your doorstep is interpreted as threatening by the adults in the house. It’s not just written for those who know what it’s like to grow up where the only home you have known, Australia, consistently rejects you by asking you to be something other than yourself in order to belong. Arab people in particular, Muslim people more broadly speaking—for they are not interchangeable terms—are overwhelmingly regarded with suspicion and hostility here, and that changes what it is possible to say now.' (Introduction)

'The chapel, and not the church, is where the funeral takes place in "Grief," a short story from David Brooks's 'Napoleon's Roads'. Because the chapel isn't used much, being less grand than the church and located inside the walls of the cemetery, it stinks of mice droppings and requires sweeping-out the day before. Here, on the pews before the open casket of Katia's Nona, dead from a fall that left the right side of her face an open wound, is where "Grief" begins, and where it ends. Nona, the death mask, her old and broken face repeated, perhaps like a Janus-face, the bookends of the story in between.'  (Publication abstract)