PODCAST: Marika Sosnowski on Law, Creative Writing, and the Making of 58 Facets

PODCAST: Marika Sosnowski on Law, Creative Writing, and the Making of 58 Facets

Marika talks to Cheryl about how her background in law shapes her writing and the challenges of merging academic insight with creative expression. She shares her deeply personal and complex writing process, the role of human connection in her work, and how legal systems can shift depending on who is interpreting them. Her debut collection, 58 Facets, is out now.

About the Author

Marika Sosnowski is a legal anthropologist with primary research interests in the fields of critical security studies (mainly ceasefires), local/rebel governance and legal systems (particularly issues around citizenship and belonging) with a geographical focus on Syria. Her academic work has been published in Third World Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Leiden Journal of International Law and Civil Wars among others. Her first book Redefining Ceasefires: Wartime Order and Statebuilding in Syria came out in June 2023 with Cambridge University Press and her second book, 58 Facets: on law, violence and revolution in September 2025 with Melbourne University Press.

Publisher details

58 Facets
Author
Marika Sosnowski
Publisher
Melbourne University Press
Genre
Non Fiction
Released
16 September, 2025
ISBN
9780522881738

Synopsis

When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened ... stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook.

58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski's grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.

Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. It challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time.

Marika Sosnowski
About the author

Marika Sosnowski

Marika Sosnowski is a legal anthropologist at Melbourne Law School and the granddaughter of Polish and Dutch Holocaust survivors. She went to Syria in 2007, primarily to eat makdous, hummus and ghazl al banat, and has worked on Syria – its revolution, war, governance and legal systems – ever since.

Books by Marika Sosnowski

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