Biographical Details: Eva Sallis

Eva Sallis was born in Bendigo, Victoria in 1964. She is a writer of literary fiction and criticism. Many of her works explore ideas on culture, exile and belonging. Her first novel Hiam won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for 1997, the Nita May Dobbie Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year 1999 and the National Fiction Award 2000. Her second novel, The City of Sealions, explores ideas on cultural and communal alienation and identity. Her novel in stories entitled Mahjar (winner of the 2004 Steele Rudd Literary Award) explores the experiences of several generations of migrants and refugees from the Arab world and, through individual stories and characters, the loss and gain of exile and of provisional identities. Fire Fire, released in 2004, is a quirky exploration of eccentric non-belonging in everything from family to country.

Her latest work of fiction is The Marsh Birds, set in Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, won the Asher Literary Award 2005 and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year 2005; NSW Premiers Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2006; National Fiction Award, Festival Awards for Literature 2006; and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book South East Asia and Pacific Region 2006. Other works include a book of literary criticism on the Arabian Nights, Sheherazade through the Looking Glass: the Metamorphosis of the 1001 Nights; and a number of short stories, poems, academic and literary articles, a translation and reviews.

Eva Sallis has an MA on the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley; and a PhD, in which she explored the many versions of the Arabian Nights. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. She studied Arabic intensively for seven years and travels regularly to the Middle East, particularly Yemen and Lebanon.

Iraqi-Australian poet Yahia al-Samawy's Two Banks with No Bridge, published 2005 by Picaro, is one of her first published translations from Arabic to English. She is working on translating stories from the Yemeni writer Abd al-Kareem al-Razihi, and has published two of these in the literary journal Heat in 2005.

Eva Sallis is co-founder of Australians Against Racism, an organisation that seeks to raise public awareness of human rights and social justice through media, arts and education. She scripted the controversial television commercial Faces in the Crowd, aired in 2001 on Human Rights Day. She devised and coordinated the Australia IS Refugees! Schools competition 2002 and There is No Place Like Home 2004. The anthology Dark Dreams, which she co-edited, publishes 37 of the stories from 2002. She co-edited a second anthology No Place Like Home, published 2005, which collects stories from the 2004 competition.