Sarah Malik
Email: sarah.malik@unsw.edu.au
Website: sarahbmalik.com
Supervisors: Roanna Gonsalves, Paul Dawson
Sarah Malik is a doctoral student in the English department at the University of New South Wales. Her areas of study include Pakistani Anglophone literature, language and literary idiom, colonial discourse analysis, Partition texts, and their relationship to Australian Pakistani post-colonial writing. She is interested in linguistic and artistic representations of displacement, immigration and hybridity and its intersection patriarchy and gender. Her focus is on literary representation of Muslims in South Asian fiction, and how multilingualism and English is used and subverted by Pakistani writers. Her work examines how literature intersects with South Asian politics and society, including collisions with colonialism, from the British Raj and the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan to diasporic immigrant minority identities in the west.
- Research area
- Research outputs
Areas of study:
- South Asian politics and society
- 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan
- Pakistani nationhood and literature
- Australian immigrant and diasporic narratives
- Immigration and exile
- Feminism, gender and intersectionality
- Post colonial literature
- Islamophobia, racism and Muslim diasporic experiences
- Racialisation, hybridity and minority fusion culture
- Identity and belonging
- Decolonial studies
Books
- Malik, S. (2022). Desi girl: On feminism, race, faith and belonging. University of Queensland Press.
- Malik, S. (2022). Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation. Hardie Grant Explore.
Awards/Grants
- 2015 - Winner, Highly Commended, UN peace prize for best news story 'The Extraordinary Detention of Sayed Abdellatif'
- 2015 - Finalist Human Rights Commission Media prize, 'The Extraordinary Detention of Sayed Abdellatif'
- 2018 - Our Watch Walkley award Winner – Best series, Best campaign and Gold Walkley, ABC Faith and Domestic Violence series.
- 2021 - Australian Council grant
- 2022 - Gold prize, Best Arts and Culture Podcast, Australian Podcast Awards - SBS host/producer 'Let Me Tell You'
- 2022 - Bronze prize, Best interview, Australian Podcast Awards - SBS host/producer The Writers Room NAIDOC special, with Larissa Behrendt and Jazz Money
Judging
- 2021/22/23 - Longlist judge for the SBS Emerging Writers Competition prize and SBS/Hardie Grant anthologies Roots, Emergence and Between Two Worlds.
- 2023/24 - Judge and chairperson of Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Award
- 2025 - Judge and mentor for the inaugural University of Queensland Mentorship Prize for Under-Represented Writers
- 2026 - Judge for the Media Diversity Walkley Award
Conferences
- 'Token to Liability: When Diversity Turns Dangerous' - UNSW Media Futures Hub conference presentation, December 2025
Associations
- UNSW Media Futures Hub HDR Steering Committee