Australia’s earliest Muslim screenwriters and playwrights Kuranda Seyit and Samah Sabawi do a table read with the new generation of Muslim writers Didem Caia and Tasnim Hossain. Giving us a glimpse of how they come up with stories for the stage and screen, they will also discuss the joys and difficulties of writing in a space with low Muslim representation.

ABOUT THE PANELLISTS

Didem Caia

Didem is a PhD Candidate at RMIT School of Media and Communications researching Acts of Presence in socially engaged performance making. She is passionate about community and cultural development and innovating approaches to developing live and written narratives with multicultural communities in Australia.
More recently, Didem was a 2021 UN Global Voices Scholar interested in women's rights and violence prevention through education and is currently producing her first feature documentary in partnership with Film Victoria and Documentary Australia titled, Nobody's Daughter.
Didem is also a lecturer in Storytelling and Scriptwriting at RMIT university.

Tasnim Hossain

Tasnim Hossain is a director, playwright, dramaturg and screenwriter. She is currently the Resident Director at Melbourne Theatre Company. She is a recipient of the Create NSW-Hayes Theatre Musical Theatre Fellowship, through which she is writing the book for a new musical.
She has directed a number of play readings and productions, including Yellow Face (Dinosaurus Productions), for which she won the 2022 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Direction of an Independent Production, and has written several short plays and solo theatre works. She was a creator, writer and actor on Carpark Clubbing (ABC iView).
Tasnim has been an Artistic Associate at NIDA, Sydney Theatre Company – Contemporary Asian Australian Performance Directors' Initiative participant, Griffin Theatre Company’s Studio Artist, Melbourne Theatre Company’s Women in Theatre mentee, and Resident Playwright at the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP). She is an ATYP board member and 2020/21 Australia Council Future Leader.

Samah Sabawi

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 Premiere Literary Awards. Samah co-edited along with Stephen Orlov 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. Host the webinar/podcast series The Book Room, Samah received a Doctor of Philosophy from Victoria University for her thesis titled Inheriting Exile, transgenerational trauma and the Palestinian Australian Identity.

Kuranda Seyit

Kuranda Seyit, studied film and theatre at Macquarie University and he completed a course in Film and TV Production at Metro Screen in 1999. Kuranda also took casual work in theatre and worked with kids in Outer western Sydney as a drama coordinator. He also worked as an actor for Horizon Theatre and was co-curator of the Changing Images Multicultural Film Festival.
In 2000 he wrote and directed his first documentary "Always A Visitor" for SBS television. In 2004 Seyit, was selected among the Bulletin Magazine's SMART 100 people in Australia. In 2005, he also completed a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University. He served on the board of the Sydney Peace Foundation and the Jury from 2007-2012.
He continued to make many short films and documentaries including a report in 2010 for SBS Dateline program titled 'Kyrgyzstan in Crisis' and a short report about the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar “Nowhere to go”.
His desire to build a better understanding of Muslims in Australia led him to begin research on the first Muslim migrant community who came here as Cameleers, after 7 years he completed the documentary, By Compass and Quran: History of Australia's Muslim Cameleers, which was broadcast on ABC TV (2015).