Palestinian-Australian writer Samah Sabawi In Conversation with Linda Mottram/ Headland Writers Festival 2025 Launch

Tuesday 20 May, 7 to 8.30 pm at Tathra Hotel.

"If there's a more important or timely book in 2024, I'm yet to come across it. Five big shiny stars.”
Good Reading Magazine

In July 1967, forty-day-old Samah was carried out of Gaza, Palestine, in her mother’s arms in search of her father who had escaped to Jordan – somewhere. Fifty-six years later, she’s an author, playwright, poet, journalist and recipient of multiple national and international awards.

Samah will discuss her book Cactus Pear for My Beloved, which has been short-listed for the Stella Literature prize, NSW Literary award and The Age Book of the Year. This is part of her Far South Coast tour on her way to present at the Sydney Writers Festival.

Cactus Pear for My Beloved follows the journey of Samah’s family over the past hundred years starting in Gaza under British rule and ending in Redland Bay, Queensland. Her parents were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homeland in Gaza.

Filled with love for land, history and its peoples, Cactus Pear for My Beloved is more than anything else a family story and love story told with optimism, humanity and feeling. It reminds us that the call of home and land remains strong, and that belief in words, art, family and community can help you rise from poverty and exile into a fulfilling life.

And yet history repeats itself. As Samah put the finishing touches on this story, another war on Gaza began - one unlike any other the city had experienced. Those in her family who had remained in Gaza have now all lost their homes. Much of the landscape described in the book has now turned to scorched earth.

This is both the personal story of a family, and the collective story of Palestine. Can Gaza rise again? History tells us it will - and Samah wants to believe it too.

Samah will talk about the process of writing the book and her other projects, reflecting on how decisions are made about the literary form of her works. Cactus Pear for My Beloved for example, was born as a result of Samah’s PhD research into post-memory within the context of generational trauma and exile.

Additionally

Her most recent visit to Gaza was in July 2023 where she visited family and reconnected with important geographical sites and landmarks. Then in October, war erupted again and now most of what she saw has been erased. Her remaining family in Gaza have also been forced to leave. Gaza has endured three major wars in the time Samah wrote this book. She is also helping settle Palestinian refugees who have been able to get to Australia. Samah has just returned from overseas where she was collecting testimonies of Palestinian women who managed to escape from Gaza.

 “The root of memoir is  mer-, meaning 'to remember' . Beloved, swells larger than the bounds of individual memory. With glorious sweeping scope and a light, elegant touch, Cactus Pear is family story cum national archive; a love story for the ages, a poet's remarkable journey, a profound act of resistance”.

Stella Judges' Report

"This book is a magic lantern and elegant mosaic and a reclaiming and a reassertion of memory and history. It is playful and heart breaking, sly and true, defiant and tender”.

Christos Tsiolkas

"Samah Sabawi has written a story of courage and struggle. Her generosity is such that above all she has gifted us a story of love of family and country. “

Tony Birch

As well as Cactus Pear for My Beloved,  her credits include the critically acclaimed 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. Samah co-edited the winner of the Patrick O’Neill Award, the anthology Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas. She also she co-authored I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso, 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.

Linda Mottram has been a journalist for 30 years. As a foreign correspondent for the ABC, she has served across the Middle East, in Russia and the Balkans, while she has also reported from Asia and the Pacific, covering wars, assassinations, refugee crises, and political upheavals. A Walkley Award winner, Linda was also ABC Sydney’s Mornings presenter and then the presenter of the evening radio current affairs flagship, “PM”. She has also reported for European radio networks, and for newspapers in Australia. Originally from Perth, she now lives in Bega, on the New South Wales south coast.

Presented by Headland Writers Festival, South East Arts and Candelo Books