Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 28 June
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Sydney-based author Amal Awad was fed up with the cliched depictions of Arab women by Western writers, so she travelled across Australia and the Middle East to speak directly with women of Arab heritage from all over the region about their own lives and their own opinions.
The result is a book, Beyond Veiled Cliches: The Real Lives of Arab Women, containing interviews with 60 women from very different backgrounds: lawyers, professors, ambassadors, activists, physicians – even a Lebanese clown. The women spoke about all sorts of issues affecting their lives from justice to history to sex and, yes, the veil.
In a culturally diverse region, what experiences do women across the Middle East have in common? How do both Muslim and non-Muslim Arab women feel about stereotypes of the Middle East? What kinds of progress are being made to improve the lives of Arab women by Arab women and how do these advancements look from the perspective of the women living them? With interviewee Joumanah El Matrah, Awad will discuss her travels and the candid and creative women she met along the way.
Featuring
Amal Awad
Amal Awad is a journalist, screenwriter, author and performer. She has contributed to The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, ELLE, Frankie, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, Daily Life, Sheilas, SBS Life and Junkee, as well as produced and presented for ABC Radio National.
As a public speaker, Amal appears at schools, universities and writers’ festivals around Australia. She presents workshops on storytelling and creativity, has been a regular panellist on ABC TV’s The Drum and was a TEDx Macquarie speaker in 2019.
Amal is the author of Courting Samira and This is How You Get Better as well as the non-fiction books The Incidental Muslim, Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women, Fridays with my Folks: Stories on Ageing, Illness and Life, and In My Past Life I Was Cleopatra. She has also contributed to the anthologies Growing Up Muslim in Australia: Coming of Age and Some Girls Do…: My Life as a Teenager.
As a screenwriter, Amal has several film and television projects in development. She has also directed short films, a pursuit she continues alongside writing and performing. Her next novel, The Things We See in the Light, will be published in 2021.
Joumanah El Matrah
Joumanah El Matrah is the CEO of the Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights (AMWCHR) and a PhD student at Swinburne University – her Doctorate is on counter terrorism and its impact on Muslim communities. Joumanah has published a number of works on Muslim women in Australia. Trained as a psychologist, Ms El Matrah is a community development worker and has been active in the community welfare sector for 20 years.
She has been a member on many government and community boards, including the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Australian Multicultural Advisory Council, the Victorian Women’s Trust and Family and Sexual Violence Case Management Centre, Lae, Papua New Guinea. She is currently a Board Member of the Council for Arab Australian Relations, Department of Foreign Affairs and a member of the Annual National Roundtable on Human Trafficking and Slavery Government Federal Attorney General’s Department.
Ms El Matrah has raised the profile of the AMWCHR at the national and international level. She was an invited participant to the Ninth Annual Global Women’s Leadership Institute; Realising the Vision of Women’s Human Rights: Understanding the Intersections of Racism, Sexism and Other Oppressions. Joumanah is also a Churchill Fellow, she researched the impact of the human rights movement on Muslim women internationally.
Hilary Harper
Hilary Harper has a degree in English Literature and Cultural Studies, a Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing, and 30 years’ experience in radio. She’s been at the ABC since 2005. She has ...