Cirrus@Austlit

Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian-Australian playwright, author, and poet.

Samah Sabawi has studied at Monash University, Griffith University, where she obtained a Masters in Communication and Media Studies. Samah received a Doctor of Philosophy from Victoria University: her PhD thesis was titled Inheriting Exile: transgenerational trauma and the Palestinian Australian Identity. 

After two of her plays, Cries from the Land (2003) and Three Wishes (2008) were produced in Canada (Sabawi was briefly based in Ottowa), Sabawi premiered her most successful play to date, Tales of a City by the Sea, at La Mama theatre, Melbourne, in November 2014. In 2017, Tales of a City by the Sea won two Drama Victoria awards (administered by the Victorian Association for Drama Education): Best Performance by a Theatre Company for VCE Drama and Best New Australian Publication for VCE Drama. It was also shortlisted for the Victorian Green Room Award for independent theatre productions.

Her play Them was given a rehearsed reading by Melbourne Theatre Company in 2018, and premiered at La Mama Theatre in 2019.

In addition to writing plays, Sabawi has also co-edited an anthology of diasporic Jewish and Palestinian plays (Double Exposure, Playwrights Canada Press, 2016, with Stephen Orlov), which won the  the 2017 Patrick O'Neill Award from the Canadian Association of Theatre Research for the best edited collection on a Canadian theatre and performance topic. The volume included Sabawi's play Tales of a City by the Sea, as well as two other plays by Palestinian writers, three by Jewish writers, and one collaboration between the two.

She has also published poetry and non-fiction in a range of Australian and international publications. Her latest work - Cactus Pear for My Beloved - was released in 2024 and is part autobiography and novel.