About the Author

Arnold Zable is an acclaimed writer, novelist, storyteller, human rights advocate, and the recipient of 2021 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. His books include Jewels and Ashes (Scribe,1991), Wanderers and Dreamers (Hyland House, 1998), Café Scheherazade (Text, 2001), The Fig Tree (Text, 2002), Scraps of Heaven (Text, 2004), Sea of Many Returns (Text 2008), Violin Lessons (Text, 2011), The Fighter (Text, 2011), and The Watermill (Text, 2020). He has published numerous stories, features, essays, columns, poetry, works for theatre, and radio documentaries, and lectured widely on the art of story in Australia and internationally. His awards include the 2013 Voltaire Prize for freedom of expression, the 2017 Australia Council Fellowship for Literature, and a range of Premiers awards. The Fig Tree CD, a musical companion to the book, won the National Folk Recording award in 2004.

Formerly a lecturer in the Arts Faculty in Melbourne University, Zable has worked in the USA, Papua New Guinea, China, and many parts of Europe and Southeast Asia. He speaks and writes with passion about memory and history, displacement and community. He has been a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Deakin, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, La Trobe and Victoria Universities, and worked with refugees, immigrants, the homeless, bushfire survivors, and other groups using writing as a means of self-understanding and healing. Between 2013 and 2015, he conducted a series of workshops for Cambodian writers on behalf of PEN International.

Zable has worked as a storyteller and in spoken word projects with musicians, and performed in venues throughout Australia. His shows include Wanderers and Dreamers: Tales of Yiddish theatre in Australia, Anytime The Wind Can Change, Journeys to Ithaca, The Fig Tree Replanted, The Watermill, and Tales of Love and Resistance, which he performed at the 2022 Krakow Jewish Festival and in the White Stork Synagogue, Wroclaw. Zable is a patron of Sanctuary, patron and immediate past President of International PEN, Melbourne, and an ambassador of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Melbourne. He has a doctorate from the School of Creative Arts, Melbourne University, where he served as a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow.