Queer Lit Double Bill

Meet the Speakers

Part 1: Mixed Metaphors

Omar Sakr is an Arab-Australian poet, essayist, and novelist. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite) and The Lost Arabs (UQP), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. A widely published essayist, Omar’s creative and critical non-fiction work has featured in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, and Kill Your Darlings, and been anthologised in Fire, Flood, Plague (Penguin Random House), Meet Me at the Intersection (Fremantle Press) and Going Postal: More Than Yes or No (Brow Books). His debut novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022) is out now.

Patrick Lenton is a writer, journalist and editor living in Melbourne. He is the author of three books, including the recent short story collection ‘Sexy Tales of Paleontology’. He writes across arts and pop culture, with regular bylines in The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald/ The Age, Junkee and more. He writes the TV recap newsletter ‘All The Heterosexual Nonsense I Was Forced To Endure’ with Bec Shaw. He is the deputy editor, arts & culture at The Conversation.

Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She was a 2021 Finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, and has written for such publications as Overland, Meanjin, SRB, and the TLS. She has an MSt in English Literature from the University of Oxford and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester, where she specialises in contemporary women’s autobiographical literary theory. Her debut novel Green Dot is forthcoming with Allen & Unwin in October 2023. 

Michael Louis Kennedy is a playwright, writer and arts professional based in Sydney. He is currently one of the Curatorial Associates of the Arts program of Sydney World Pride 2023. In 2020 and 2021 he served as the Co-Director of the National Young Writers Festival, an annual festival usually based in Newcastle, NSW. He has previously worked for the Sydney Fringe, Summerhall (Edinburgh Fringe) and Belvoir Street Theatre.

His writing has been featured in Overland, Voiceworks, Brag, Going Down Swinging, Transportation Press, Baby Teeth, Sydney Morning Herald and more. As a playwright his work All The Fraudulent Horse Girls was recently performed by Brooklyn Rep at The Glory, London, and by Lazy Yarns at The Blue Room, Perth. In 2022 he premiered his site specific audio-drama The Clam Before The Storm with Bondi Festival 2022, and co-authored All That Glitters Is Not Mould, premiering at NIDA (2022). He has also had readings and productions on the Sydney Fringe Festival, at the Old 505, Sydney Mardi Gras’s Playlist playreading festival, and the staple queer performance institution Queer Theory in Glasgow, Scotland. He is currently part of Sydney Theatre Company’s Emerging Writers Group, as well as undertaking a mentorship through Kill Your Darlings to develop a new Australian novel.

Meet the Speakers

Part 2: On Queer East Asian Pride

Jason Om is an award-winning television reporter with the ABC’s 7.30 program, and author of his memoir All Mixed Up. Released in 2022, All Mixed Up (ABC Books/HarperCollins Australia) is a powerful story about growing up in a multiracial, multi-faith family, being gay and Asian, rediscovering love, and finding resilience. In 2017, Jason attracted widespread praise for his personal story about his Cambodian dad’s sixteen-year struggle to accept him as gay. The article and TV piece ran Australia-wide, attracting a million views. Viewers were moved to tears, and the story earned Jason a nomination in the 2018 LGBTQ Honour Awards. In 2021, Jason won the Media Diversity Australia Award at the Mid-Year Walkleys, and in 2022, the media accolade at the LGBTQ Honour Awards. Previously, he’s been a news presenter on the ABC News Channel and a reporter for ABC News Breakfast, ABC Life, Lateline and ABC Radio. He is a vocal advocate of gay Asians, Asian Australians and representation.

Dr Shawna Tang is a lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research lies in the nexus of sexuality, gender and race, with a focus on postcolonial Singapore, and Asia. Specifically, she studies how queer identities, communities and politics need to take seriously questions of race, nationalism, capitalism and geopolitics. She is the author of Postcolonial Lesbian Identities in Singapore and co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia. Her theoretical and methodological investments in feminist, Marxist, critical race and queer cultural studies guide her research projects on sexuality studies in Asia; non-normative female sexualities and relations in Singapore; the globalisation of same-sex marriage and LGBT politics in Singapore and Indonesia; older lesbian sexualities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore; gender and cultural politics in Australia as part of Asia; and transmasculine boyhoods. Shawna is a researcher in the Feminist Boys Studies Research group and brings to the project analyses of transgender boyhood from a critical race and queer studies perspective. Her Twitter handle is @shawnatang.

Hendri Yulius Wijaya is an Indonesian writer, author of Intimate Assemblages: The Politics of Queer Identities and Sexualities in Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia (Routledge 2022). He completed a research master’s degree in Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney and a master’s degree in Public Policy at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He writes about gender, sexuality, popular culture, and sustainability for a mainstream audience in Indonesia. His writings have been published in the Indonesia and the Malay World, Laws, Art and Market (A&M), Jakarta Post, Esquire, TEMPO, Indonesia at Melbourne, and New Mandala, among others. He has also published a poetry collection, and co-edited a queer speculative short stories and a queer personal essays collection. All are published in Indonesian language. In his professional capacity, he currently works full time for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability with large businesses, SMEs, government institutions, and universities.

Benjamin Law is an Australian writer and broadcaster. He’s the author of The Family Law (2010), Gaysia (2012), the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101 (2017) and editor of Growing Up Queer in Australia (2019). Benjamin is also an AWGIE Award-winning screenwriter who created and co-wrote three seasons of the award-winning TV series The Family Law (SBS/Hulu/Comedy Central Asia), wrote the sold-out mainstage play Torch the Place (Melbourne Theatre Company, 2020), and is co-executive producer, co-creator and co-writer on the forthcoming Netflix comedy-drama Wellmania. He has a PhD in creative writing and cultural studies from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Every week, Benjamin co-hosts ABC Radio National’s weekly national pop culture show Stop Everything and interviews public figures for Good Weekend. He hosted ABC TV’s two-part feature documentary on Chinese-Australian history Waltzing the Dragon, and has appeared on TV shows like Filthy Rich and Homeless (SBS), Q&A (ABC), The Drum (ABC) and The Project (Ten). He has also written for over 50 publications in Australia and beyond—including the Monthly, frankie, Guardian, Monocle and Australian Financial Review—and is a literary scout for Hachette Australia.