In her TEDx talk, Moving Beyond The Token Minority, writer Amal Awad speaks about her early exposure to the power of storytelling via her father’s video rental store in suburban Sydney. As she grew up, she identified a problem with the stories available to her as a Palestinian Australian. “As a female in an Arab Muslim family growing up in the West, I was nowhere to be found,” she notes in the talk. “Nor could I find anyone who resembled me in the films I watched. When we did appear, the depictions were never very nice or authentic.” A drive to counter this with nuanced representations of individuals, real and fictional, whose identities intersect with Awad’s own has been evident throughout her multifaceted career, which has included working as a journalist and as a screenwriter for film and TV, and publishing both fiction and non-fiction titles. Awad’s latest book, her eighth, is the novel Bitter & Sweet. Centred on Zeina, a chef who is the daughter of a restaurateur, it explores, among other things, the many and varied roles food and cooking can play in people’s lives: as a form of self-expression, a way to bring people together, a connection to culture and heritage, and more.
Could you tell me a little about Zeina, and the situation she’s facing in Bitter & Sweet?
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