Omar Sakr talks to Cheryl about resistance, censorship, and the power of poetry to bring clarity, connection, and hope in turbulent times. His latest work in collaboration with illustrator Safdar Ahmed, The Nightmare Sequence, is out now.

About The Author

Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the acclaimed author of a novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022) and three poetry collections, notably The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. He was the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win this prestigious award. The Lost Arabs was also shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award; it was released in the US and worldwide through Andrews McMeel Universal. His newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023) has been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the ALS Gold Medal. In September 2023 he was awarded the Bess Hokin Prize by POETRY magazine, an institution he has subsequently boycotted for its refusal to name or otherwise respond to the genocide perpetrated on Palestine by America and its allies

In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, featuring in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Margins, Mizna, Wildness, Peril, Circulo de Poesía, Australian Book Review, Overland, and Griffith Review, among others. Omar’s poems have been anthologised in Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Best of Australian Poems 2021 (Australian Poetry, 2021), Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Vintage Knopf, 2020), the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020), Best Australian Poems 2016 (Black Inc, 2016), and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016).

A widely published essayist, Omar’s creative and critical non-fiction work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Archer, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, SBS Life, The Wheeler Centre, and Junkee. His essays have been anthologised in This Arab Is Queer (Saqi Books, 2022), Fire, Flood, and Plague (Penguin Random House, 2020), Meet Me at the Intersection (Fremantle Press, 2018) and Going Postal: More Than Yes or No (Brow Books, 2018), and his short fiction has appeared in Kindred: 12 Queer LoveOzYA Stories (Walker Books, 2019) as well as After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020).