Longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize
Samah Sabawi – Cactus Pear For My Beloved
Memoir · Penguin Random House
About the Book
A family story from Gaza.
The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.
Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands.
Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.
One of the gifts of Samah Sabawi’s Baba is to remain open-hearted and optimistic.
Cactus Pear For My Beloved, swells larger than the bounds of individual memory.
– 2025 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Samah Sabawi
Samah Sabawi is an author, playwright and poet and a recipient of multiple awards both nationally and internationally. Her theatre credits include the critically acclaimed and award-winning plays Tales of a City by the Sea and THEM. In 2020 Samah received the prestigious Green Room Award for Best Writing in the independent theatre category, and was shortlisted for both the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. With Stephen Orlov Samah edited the anthology Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, winner of the Patrick O’Neill Award and she co-authored I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso, edited by Vacy Vlazna, winner of the Palestine Book Award. Samah received a Doctor of Philosophy from Victoria University for her thesis titled Inheriting Exile, transgenerational trauma and the Palestinian Australian Identity.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Sabawi takes a leap of faith in publishing her project to a larger audience beyond academia, and it pays off.” Valerie Chidiac Honi Soit
“Amid the tragedy and betrayal of international interventions and invasion, personal hardships are softened by humour, love, scholarly meditations and the poetry of the Quran.” Monique Grbec The Saturday Paper
Links
Read an interview with Samah Sabawi on Words Without Borders
Judges’ Report
The root of memoir is the proto-indo-european mer-, meaning ‘to remember’. Samah Sabawi’s latest book, Cactus Pear For My Beloved, swells larger than the bounds of individual memory. With glorious sweeping scope and a light, elegant touch, Cactus Pear is family story cum national archive; a love story for the ages, a poet’s remarkable journey, a profound act of resistance. Sabawi begins with her father in contemporary Queensland (‘You want to reconstruct my life with your words?’) then leaps back in time to his father, and his father before that, charting the life of Palestinians through her lineage and under successive Empires: Ottoman, British, the 1948 Nakba and life after. It is life that Sabawi so vividly portrays. A ‘fierce poetic duel’, family beach trips, cinnamon tea, school. History, particularly in this region of the world, is often told in dry, impersonal reports: here, Sabawi animates these epoch moments in stunning, intimate detail. Spare, gracious prose delivers Gaza not as a barren battlefield, but a people, proud and human and persisting. ‘How does love triumph over a wall,’ a character asks Samah’s father. Stories like this surely form part of the answer.
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