Omar Sakr

Omar Sakr is a poet, editor, and prose writer born in western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants.

Sakr is author of three poetry collections, including Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023) and, most notably, The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), published in the United States by Andrews McMeel Universal. The collection won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, making Sakr the first Arab Australian Muslim to win this prestigious prize. 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. Sakr’s poems have been published in Arabic, English, and Spanish. He is also the author of the novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022). 

Sakr’s poetry has been anthologized in Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); Best of Australian Poems 2021 (Australian Poetry, 2021); Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Vintage Knopf, 2020), edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters; The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020); Best Australian Poems 2016 (Black Inc, 2016); and Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016). His essays have been anthologized in This Arab Is Queer (Saqi Books, 2022); 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). His short fiction has appeared in After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020) and Kindred: 12 Queer LoveOzYA Stories (Walker Books, 2019).

In 2019, Sakr was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and, in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. In 2023, the Poetry Foundation awarded him the Bess Hokin Prize.