Cactus Pear For My Beloved

SHORTLISTED, 2025 Stella Prize.
Shortlisted for THE AGE Book of the Year.
Shortlisted for the NSW Literary Award for Non Fiction.

‘If there’s a more important or timely book in 2024, I’m yet to come across it. Five big shiny stars.‘
GOOD READING MAGAZINE

‘Samah Sabawi has written a story of courage and struggle. Her generosity is such that above all she has gifted us a story of love of family and country.‘
TONY BIRCH

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.

Author Biography

Dr Samah Sabawi is an award-winning author, playwright and poet. Her memoir Cactus Pear for My Beloved has been shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, The Age Book of the Year and the NSW Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize, the book was also highly commended by the Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards. Sabawi’s theatre credits include the award-winning plays Tales of a City by the Sea (2016) and THEM (2019). 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 the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.