Stella Day Out – In Conversation with Samah Sawabi

2025 Stella shortlisted author Samah Sabawi is joined by Fatima Measham to discuss art, activism, and storytelling that crosses borders – of place, politics, and the heart.

Cactus Pear for my Beloved: A Family Story From Gaza.

The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.

Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands.

Filled with love for land, history, people it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.

One of the gifts of Samah Sabawi's Baba is to remain open-hearted and optimistic.