Omar Sakr

Omar Sakr is an award-winning poet born and raised in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books, 2017), as well as The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. He is the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win this prestigious award.

The Lost Arabs was also shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award; it has been released in the US and worldwide through Andrews McMeel Universal. In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry.

Omar’s poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, and anthologised in Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Vintage Knopf, 2020), The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020), Best Australian Poems 2016 (Black Inc, 2016), and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016). A widely published essayist and writer, his debut novel is Son of Sin (Affirm Press).