Rawah Arja

Is a member of the Western Sydney women writers’ collective Finishing School. Her writing has featured in Arab, Australian, Other (Picador, 2019), SBS Voices and at the Sydney Writer’s Festival. She is a WestWords Varuna Emerging Writers’ Fellow, and teachers creative writing at schools and after-school workshops. Her first novel, The F Team, was recently published by Giramondo.

In this interview, originally recorded for the WestWords Mini-masterclass podcast series, Rawah talks to James Roy about mining the experience of growing up Lebanese-Australian in Western Sydney, and how this influenced the writing of her first novel.