Challenging Australian Lit

Writer MICHAEL MOHAMMED AHMAD is the director of the Western Sydney literacy movement Sweatshop and author of The Tribe, a novel about a small Muslim sect that fled the civil war in Lebanon and came to Australia. His follow-up novel, The Lebs, tackles the vilification of Arab-Australian Muslim men and centres on Bani, a boy attending Punchbowl High School, which for a period of time was lined with barbed wire and reinforced with bulletproof glass.