Omar Sakr is an award-winning poet born and raised in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books, 2017), a collection of poetry shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which has been shortlisted in the Queensland Literary Awards, for the John Bray Poetry Award, and for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. The Lost Arabs has also been released in the US through Andrews McMeel Universal. In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry.
Omar’s poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish, featuring in Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Margins, Tinderbox, Wildness, Peril, Circulo de Poesía, Overland, Meanjin, and Griffith Review, among others. He has also been anthologised in Best Australian Poems 2016, and in Contemporary Australian Poetry. Omar placed runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets (2016), and has been shortlisted for Cosmonaut Avenue’s Creative Nonfiction Prize (2017), the Fair Australia Poetry Prize (2016), the Story Wine Prize (2015), and the ACU Poetry Prize (2015). Elsewhere, his articles and essays have appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Guardian,The Sydney Morning Herald, Archer, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, SBS Online, SBS Life, SBS Comedy, The Wheeler Centre, and Junkee.
Omar co-hosts the podcast Extraordinary Voices for Extraordinary Times with Ellen Van Neerven. They alternate monthly hosting duties in this podcast that mixes dialogue with poetry readings.