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Double Booked Club
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Double Booked returns in June, with a conversation between two superb Australian writers. Omar Sakr and Melanie Cheng are two very different voices with very different styles, but over the past few years, both have blasted welcome fresh air into the Australian literary scene.
Melanie Cheng is a GP as well as a writer and her debut short-story collection, Australia Day, won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her new book, Room for a Stranger, is a novel set in Melbourne, about the unlikely friendship between an older woman and a young student from Hong Kong.
Omar Sakr's second book of poetry, The Lost Arabs, has been described as a 'seething, urgent collection' about sexuality, divinity and redemption. His debut collection, These Wild Houses, was critically acclaimed and shortlisted for several awards including the Kenneth Slessor Prize.
Hosted by Khalid Warsame, the pair will discuss their work at a lunchtime session in June.
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This event will be Auslan interpreted.
Readings will be our bookseller for this event.
Watch the stream here
Who?
Khalid Warsame
Khalid Warsame is a writer, photographer, and arts producer who lives in Melbourne. His essays and fiction have appeared in the Lifted Brow, Overland, the Big Issue, Cordite Poetry Review, and LitHub. He has previously edited fiction for the Lifted Brow, worked as a creative producer at the Footscray Community Arts Centre and Co-Directed the National Young Writers Festival. He is currently working on his first novel.
Omar Sakr
Omar Sakr is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite, 2017) and The Lost Arabs (UQP, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have been widely published and anthologised in places such as the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Vintage Knopf, 2020), the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020), Best Australian Poems (Black Inc, 2016) and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016). Born and raised on Dharug country to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants, he lives there still. His debut novel, Son of Sin, is forthcoming with Affirm Press.
Melanie Cheng
Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner from Melbourne. She is the author of Australia Day, which won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, and Room for a Stranger, which was longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. Her non-fiction has been published in the Guardian, the Age, The Weekend Australian and SBS Online. She is The Saturday Paper's health columnist.
Double Booked Club
Block out one Monday every month in your calendar. You're booked. Actually, you're Double Booked.
In these sessions, we bring together two great local fiction authors for a leisurely, wide-ranging discussion of their new books, their backlists, their shared themes and each other's work.
Ahead of each event, ticket-bookers will receive some extra reading material relating to the books in question, so you can swot up in advance (you epic nerd). Can't make it? Watch from home with our live-stream.
