Sara Saleh wins 'Readers Choice Award' at The Woolahra Digital Literary Awards

Congratulations to Sara Saleh for winning the Readers' Choice Award at the 2024 Woollahra Digital Literary Awards for her poem Punctuation as Organised Violence, from her collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat beating over 20 writers across all categories. Additionally, Sara was shortlisted for the Digital Innovation Award.

Judge Ali Whitelock had this to say about the shortlist:

This year's submissions were bursting with poems that took great risk, poems that walked their truths on a knife’s edge, poems that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and poems that made me drop to my knees. The subjects ranged from devastating notes on the rental crisis, to Punctuation as Organised Violence; from poems about a school musical performance that could never have a black dido to poems where lungs blow air the shape of chandeliers. As I made my way through the poems I’d stick the short list potentials on my wall with blu-tac. The wall ended up papered with so many I could no longer see the wall. But a shortlist is meant to be a short list (the clue is in the name). I want to send deep gratitude to every poet who submitted this year––each of your poems has sketched an indelible contour on the ordnance survey map of my heart.

The Woollahra Digital Literary Award is a national literary award supporting innovation in Australian literature and publishing, encouraging writers producing work in a digital medium.

Sara M Saleh is a writer, human rights law expert, organiser, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Her words have been showcased at exhibitions and festivals from St Andrews to Bangalore and have lit up the walls of The Rocks and the Opera House, and she has appeared alongside alongside some of the biggest names in contemporary literature and arts.

While Sara’s literary achievements as a poet, essayist, and prose writer transcend medium, genre and geography, she is most celebrated for her work co-editing the critically acclaimed anthology, Arab, Australian, Other (Picador, 2019) and for her historic win of the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published widely in English and Arabic in Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Red Room, Kill Your Darlings, Rabbit Poetry Journal, SBS, and in anthologies the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, Racism, Making Mirrors, Solid Air, A Blade of Grass, Groundswell: The Best of Australian Poetry, Borderless: a transnational anthology of feminist poetry, and Another Australia, and she has been commissioned to write and perform for theatre, TV, and music.

Sara's debut novel Songs for the Dead and Living (Affirm Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the Khairallah Prize for Literature and a NSW Premier’s Literary Award, and her full-length poetry collection, The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat(UQP, 2023) won the 2023 Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal, the ALS Mary Gilmore Award.

Working within her multiple communities to seed critical change through storytelling and the arts, Sara has run writing workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals across the country and internationally. Her latest collaborative project, Muslim Poetry Project: Retreat and Anthology, is underway. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency, and Amant New York writers residency, among other honours and accolades.

She is based on Bidjigal land with her partner and beloved three cats and pup they affectionately named belly hooks.

Congratulations again to Sara Saleh on her win!