Sara M. Saleh is a writer, a poet, human rights lawyer, organiser, and the daughter of Palestinian, Egyptian, and Lebanese migrants. She joins Mel to talk about two new books she's released this year: Songs for the Dead and the Living (out now through Affirm Press), and her new poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat (UQP). They talk about Sara's creative process, her relationships with both herself and her characters, how place and memory are implicated in her writing, and how the role of the artist is to bear witness and to 'name the things that need to be named, and to articulate alternate visions and futurities'.

Finally, she does a reading of her poem 'The Year that Changed Everything', based on the year 1948 which is also known as the year of the Nakba. Nakba means 'catastrophe' in Arabic; and it names the year that Palestinians were dispossesed from their homelands during the establishment of the State of Israel where 750,000 people were exiled, and many killed. For Palestinian people, this catastrophe has never ended and is ongoing today.