Sara El Sayed is a writer based in Meanjin (Brisbane). Her work appears in Growing Up African in Australia (Black Inc.) and Arab-Australian-Other (Pan Macmillan), among other places. In 2020 she received a Queensland Writers Fellowship and was shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Her debut memoir Muddy People is the story of her family, having migrated from Alexandria, Egypt in the early 2000s to south-east Queensland. Muddy People explores what it means for Soos to grow up Arab-Muslim while living in a white-dominant community, and how the messiness of family shapes who she is.