Melanie Cheng and Omar Sakr

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.

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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 an Arab Australian poet, born of Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. His debut collection, These Wild Houses (Cordite, 2017) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His latest collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP, 2019), has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the NSW Premier's Multicultural Literary Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, and the Colin Roderick Award. In 2019 he received the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020 the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. A widely published essayist, Omar lives in Sydney, where he is currently working on his debut novel.

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.