Samah Sabawi / سماح السبعاوي

Samah Sabawi

Samah Sabawi (Arabic: سماح السبعاوي; born 1967) is a Palestinian playwright, scholar, commentator and poet. Her plays include Cries from the Land (2003), Three Wishes (2008), Tales of a City by the Sea (2014) and Them (2019). Sabawi has received two Drama Victoria Awards, a Green Room Award, and a place in the VCE Drama curriculum for the latter two plays. Since 2014, Tales of a City by the Sea has been staged over 100 times in theaters and schools around the world. THEM will be remounted in July 2021, with a premiere at the Arts Centre Melbourne before it tours through Shepparton, Bendigo, and Sydney.

Sabawi's essays and opeds have appeared in The Australian, Al Jazeera, Al-Ahram, The Globe and Mail, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald. She is a frequent guest/co-presenter on 774 ABC Melbourne's Jon Faine's Conversation Hour. She appeared alongside Israeli writer Ari Shavit, BBC News New York and UN Correspondent Nick Bryant, actress Miriam Margolyes, and numerous others.

Sabawi is a policy advisor to the Palestinian policy network Al Shabaka, and a member of the board of directors of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations. She participated in various public forums on peace building, women in conflict areas, the Palestinian right of return, as well as various presentations for interfaith groups. Previously, she was a public advocate for Australians for Palestine, Executive Director and Media Spokesperson for the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations (NCCAR), and a Subject Matter Expert on the Middle East's cultural and political landscape for the Canadian Foreign Service Institute's Center for Intercultural Learning.

Writings

Samah Sabawi has co-edited Double Exposure, an anthology of Jewish and Palestinian plays from diaspora for the Playwrights Canada Press. Her poetry has also been featured in various magazines and books, most recently in an anthology published by West End Press titled With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century.
In 2016, Novum Publishing released I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso. The anthology aimed to feature "deeply personal and deeply political expressions of three gifted Palestinian poets in exile". The book received Middle East Monitor's 2016 Palestine Book Award.
Currency Press published the script of Tales of a City by the Sea in 2016, which was then listed on the VCE play list for Drama students years 11 and 12. At the Drama Victoria Awards, it earned the title of Best Publication for VCE in 2016.
In 2024 Penguin published Cactus Pear for My Beloved, about her family's life in Palestine and her parents' migration to Australia.