Playwright, author, and poet.
Samah Sabawi has studied at Monash University, Griffith University (where she obtained a Masters in Communication and Media Studies), and Victoria University (where she began a PhD in 2016).
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 is due to premiere with 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.