Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books, 2017), and The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. He is the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win this prestigious award. The Lost Arabs was also shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award; it has been released in the US and worldwide through Andrews McMeel Universal. His debut novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press), is forthcoming in March 2022.
In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. Omar’s poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, featuring in the American Academy of Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Margins, Tinderbox, Wildness, Peril, Circulo de Poesía, Overland, Meanjin, and Griffith Review, among others. He has also been anthologised in Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Vintage Knopf, 2020), in the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020), in Best Australian Poems 2016 (Black Inc, 2016), and in Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016).
A widely published essayist, Omar’s creative and critical non-fiction work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Archer, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, SBS Life, The Wheeler Centre, and Junkee. His essays have been anthologised in Fire, Flood, and Plague (Penguin Random House, 2020), Meet Me at the Intersection (Fremantle Press, 2018) and Going Postal: More Than Yes or No (Brow Books, 2018), and his short fiction has appeared in Kindred: 12 Queer LoveOzYA Stories (Walker Books, 2019) as well as After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020).