Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 22 June
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is a writer whose novels explore Australia’s smouldering tribalism – found as much within its communities as between them – eschewing clichés and easy, feel-good conclusions.
His first novel, The Tribe, introduced readers to the complex family life of protagonist Bani Adam, a young boy from a religious Lebanese Muslim family in western Sydney. In The Lebs, Bani is a teenager grappling with a different set of conflicts – about superiority, sexuality, violence and faith – played out against the backdrop of high school and graduation.
Ahmad’s writing stings and sparks; it’s tense, insistent and unsettling, deploying a hungry, confrontational vernacular. Bani’s narration doesn’t present a worthy, heartwarming model of Lebanese Australian-ness. Instead, we’re offered a provocative, complex and sometimes brutal portrait – take or leave it.
In conversation with host Elizabeth McCarthy, Michael Mohammed Ahmad comes to Montalto to discuss multicultural identities, coming of age and the disorienting power of language.
Presented in partnership with Montalto Vineyard and Olive Grove.
Antipodes Bookshop and Gallery will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Elizabeth McCarthy
Elizabeth McCarthy is the Program Director of the Queenscliffe Literary Festival. She also works as an editorial content producer for ABC Radio Melbourne, and in an engagement role for RMIT Culture. She previously ...
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is an Arab-Australian writer, editor, teacher and community arts worker. He is the founder and director of Sweatshop, a literacy movement in Western Sydney devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse artists through creative writing.
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 received his Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University in 2017.