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Writing and Society Research centre event and Portraits, Bankstown Campus

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad is director of SWEATSHOP: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and author of The Tribe and The Lebs. He was Chief Editor of Westside Publications from 2005–2012. His stories have appeared in the GuardianHEAT, Seizure, and The Lifted Brow. In 2012 Mohammed was recipient of the Australia Council Kirk Robson Award. He completed his PHD with the UWS Writing & Society Research Centre.

Titles

The Tribe

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

172 pages
Paperback, 17 x 15 cm
Published May 2014
ISBN 9781922146564

For the last two decades the representation of Arab-Australian Muslims has been coloured by media reports of sexual assault, drug-dealing, drive-by shootings and terrorist conspiracy. This has made it difficult to understand a community which plays an important role in contemporary Australian society. Here, in his first work of fiction, Michael Mohammed Ahmad offers a privileged introduction to the life and customs of ‘The Tribe’, members of a small Muslim sect who fled to Australia just before the civil war in Lebanon. His stories focus on the relationships between three generations of an extended family, the House of Adam, as seen by one of its youngest offspring, a child called Bani, at key moments in its development. Ahmad’s writing is aware of tradition, but its real power is in its simplicity and honesty, and the directness with which he conveys the emotional responses of his young narrator.