Photo: Jon Tjhia

More than a billion people live with some form of disability. That’s about 15% of the world's population and yet across the globe, people with disabilities face regular contraventions of their basic rights. These range from egregious abuses – such as being put in shackles – to basic barriers to education, employment, safety and inclusion.

'Having people around you think that you have no future … that's the challenge that people with disabilities face.'

Nujeen Mustafa

In this conversation, presented in partnership with Human Rights Watch, we focus on some key issues and priorities relating to disability rights in the region and in conflict zones. Hear from Shantha Rau Barriga from Human Rights Watch, and from author and disability rights advocate Nujeen Mustafa. Nujeen's book, Nujeen: One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-torn Syria in a Wheelchair, tells the story of her extraordinary journey from Syria to Germany in a wheelchair – a journey she undertook in 2014 at the age of 16.

The pair discuss Nujeen’s personal story and speak more broadly on issues of displacement, detention, disability and human rights. Hosted by David Manne.

 

Samah Sabawi at the Wheeler Centre

‘For Palestinian writers, we write for our lives,’ Samah Sabawi has written. ‘We write to exist.’

Sabawi is an award-winning playwright, author, essayist and poet. She’s also a policy advisor for Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka, and the second featured speaker in our PEN Writing in Exile series.

Sabawi's family left Palestine following Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip when she was a baby in 1967. She’s lived and worked across the globe throughout her life, but retains strong ties to the place of her birth. In Australia, she’s perhaps best known for her play, Tales of a City by the Sea, which won two Drama Victoria awards in 2016 and has also been rapturously received by audiences in Palestine, Canada and Malaysia. In the same year, the prolific Sabawi contributed to the anthology I Remember My Name, which received Middle East Monitor’s 2016 Palestine Book Award. Her most recent play, THEM, premieres later in May 2019 at the La Mama Courthouse.

Sabawi’s writing is concerned with displacement, conflict and diaspora. ‘Through writing our stories, our poems and songs,’ she has written, ‘we reconstruct our erased past, assert our present and try to shape our future.’ Appearing live at the Wheeler Centre, she talks to Sami Shah about writing for her life.

Presented in partnership with PEN Melbourne.