Michael Mohammed Ahmad is an Arab-Australian writer, editor, teacher and community arts worker and the founder and director of Sweatshop, a literacy movement in Western Sydney devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse artists through creative writing.
This March, Hachette Australia is thrilled to be releasing a new fictional work from him, titled THE LEBS.
A novel that is in turns confronting, heartbreaking and illuminating, THE LEBS is in the vein of Maxine Beneba Clarke's FOREIGN SOIL and Peter Polites' DOWN THE HUME, voices from diverse backgrounds, telling the untold stories of their generation.
THE LEBS is based on Mohammed's own experiences as a young Arab-Australian Muslim from Western Sydney who attended the notorious Punchbowl Boys High School, the primary setting of the novel. THE LEBS takes us inside the mind of Bani, a young man coming to terms with his place in a world of hostility and hopelessness – with the dream of having so much more.
This is the latest installment in a wave of powerful new novels and literary voices from minority Australian writers, Michael Mohammed Ahmad offers new and unique insights into a largely misunderstood and poorly represented new Australian community.
Mohammed's essays and short stories have appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, The Guardian, Heat, Seizure, The Lifted Brow, The Australian and Coming of Age: Australian Muslim Stories. His debut novel, THE TRIBE, received a 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists of the Year Award. Mohammed also adapted THE TRIBE for the stage with Urban Theatre Projects in 2015, which received the 2016 FBi Smac Award for Best On-Stage Production. Mohammed received his Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University in 2017.
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