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Forbidden
Fruit
Hanifa
Deen is a Melbourne-based award-winning author and social
commentator of Pakistani-Muslim ancestry who writes narrative
non-fiction. She has held a number of high profile positions
including Hearing Commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission; Deputy Commissioner of the
Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission of WA, and was a
director on the Board of SBS for five years.
Hanifa
Deen was born in the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie WA and
blames all that desert air for turning her into a ‘Muslim
maverick’. Five generations of the Deen family ‘belong’
to Australia going back to both her grandfathers who came out
from what is today Pakistan in the 1890s, before the White
Australia Policy of the era closed the doors for nearly
eighty years.
Hanifa
is proud of her Muslim childhood and adolescence, but speaks
out against what she sees as fundamentalist ideologies on both
sides of the religious divide.
She is also a feminist and a
great believer in the capacity of women to reinvent themselves
and is particularly fond of disobedient women in history,
literature and real life: she began her career as a high
school teacher (English and History), taught English as a
foreign language for seven years in (West) Germany at a
boys’ high school before returning to Australia where she
became active in ethnic affairs and human rights at both a
community and, finally, at a professional level in the public
service.
Feeling
that an irreverent tongue was better suited to writing than a
career in the public service and concerned that years of
churning out ‘Yes, Minister’ memos and reports was turning
her into a writer of turgid prose, Hanifa turned to full time
writing fourteen years ago.
PUBLICATIONS:
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Caravanserai:
A Journey Among Australian Muslims, (Allen & Unwin)
won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 1996. Fremantle
Arts Centre Press released a revised and updated edition
of Caravanserai
rewritten in the shadow of the September 11 tragedy
in
May 2003. Judges described Caravanserai
‘…as an outstanding contribution to Australian
literature.’ The book was also short listed for the Nita
B. Kibble Award.
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Broken
Bangles,
her
best-selling book on the lives Pakistani and Bangladeshi
women, published by Transworld, was short-listed in 1998
for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award; a
second edition was published in India in 2000 by
Penguin-India.
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The
Crescent and the Pen: The Strange Journey of Taslima
Nasreen was released in the USA, in November 2006 by
Greenwood Publishing under the Praeger imprint. In the
course of this book Hanifa travelled, like a literary
sleuth, on the trail of freedom of expression icon,
Taslima Nasreen to disclose the real story behind the
campaign to save the feminist writer who has been likened
to a ‘female Salman Rushdie’.
-
The
Jihad Seminar was published in 2008 by University of
Western Australia Press and was short listed for the
Australian Human Rights Commission award for non-fiction.
The book covered Australia's first case of religious hate
speech, which took place in Melbourne.
-
Broken
Bangles: a new version is pending.
In
2007 she completed a consultancy for the National Australian
Archives on Muslims in Australia 1901-1975 and compiled a
series of essays and biographies for the NAA’s website
‘Uncommon Lives’. This will be published in book form in
2010 under the title Ali Abdul v. The King.
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