Girls Write Up Western Sydney 2019 Artists – Thursday 7 February 2019
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Randa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University where she is researching the generational impact of the war on terror on Muslim and non-Muslim youth born into a post 9/11 world. She is a prominent Australian Palestinian advocate and a multi-award winning author of 11 books and is published in over twenty countries. Her debut novel, Does My Head Look Big In This? is currently being adapted for a major feature film. Randa is currently co-editing (with Sara Saleh) the upcoming anthology Growing Up Arab in Australia, to be published by Picador
Sarah Ayoub
Sarah is a freelance journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Sun-Herald, Girlfriend, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, SBS Life, ABC, Marie-Claire, and the Sunday Telegraph. Sarah teaches journalism at The University of Notre Dame in Sydney, where she is a PhD candidate researching the representations of culturally diverse female teens in Australian Young Adult Literature. She is the author of Hate is Such a Strong Word and The Yearbook Committee.
Winnie Dunn
Winnie is a Tongan-Australian writer and community arts worker from Mt Druitt. She is the manager of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and the literary editor of The Big Black Thing and Bent not Broken: Ten Years of Creative Writing from the City of Canterbury Bankstown. Winnie’s essays and short stories have been published in The Lifted Brow, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Griffith Review and SBS Life. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at Western Sydney University in 2017.
Lorin Elizabeth
Lorin is a spoken word poet, organiser and teaching artist from Wollongong, who co-founded Enough Said Poetry Slam and is published in Going Down Swinging’s audio anthology. Lorin has toured the USA poetry slam circuit, featured at the Women of the World Poetry Slam in Albuquerque, NM and self-published an EP called Poems. In 2017, Lorin featured at Canberra’s Noted Festival and hosted The Rumble Youth Slam at Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Kirli Saunders
Kirli is a proud Gunai woman with ties to the Yuin, Gundungurra, Gadigal and Biripi people. She is a children’s author, poet, emerging playwright and motorcyclist. Kirli is the Manager of Poetic Learning and Aboriginal Cultural Liaison at Red Room Poetry. She was awarded ‘Worker of the Year 2017’ at the NAIDOC awards in the Illawarra/Shoalhaven region and has been nominated for a National NAIDOC award in 2018. Kirli founded the Poetry in First Languages project. Her book, The Incredible Freedom Machines, was selected for Bologna Book Fair in 2018, and it is to be published in French and English by Scholastic in 2019. Kirli’s forthcoming picture books include Our Dreaming and Happy Every After (Scholastic). Her poetry collection, Kindred, will be released in 2019 (Magabala Books). Kirli was runner up in the Nakata Brophy Prize 2018 and Highly Commended in Black&Write 2018. Her poetry has been published by a number of journals including Cordite, Overland and Red Room Poetry and commissioned for public art in Darling Harbour and Melbourne. She was Writer in Residence at Bundanon Trust 2017/18, and The Literature Centre in 2018, where she performed The Incredible Freedom Machines with Matt Ottley and the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra. She will return in 2019 to perform with The Literature Centre, in rural WA, Coco’s Island, and Christmas Island.
