Written by Shayla Zreika, Al Bint La 3inda Makan was selected as the Readers' Choice winner in 2026 from more than 300 entries. Get to know Zreika here and read her winning story below.
Who is an author that inspires you?
It is almost impossible to identify a singular author that inspires me, both as a creative and an individual.
However, I can pin-point it to a category of authors: those who write in, or in the style of the Arabic language. From the past, it’s authors like Khalil Gibran, Tayeb Saleh, Ghassan Kanafi; and in the present, Rim Battal and Yasmin Zaher. It’s also the creatives I witness and meet within my local community (shout out the Bankstown Poetry Slam and the Sydney Muslim Writers Festival).
I believe writing, and being a writer, is the mastering and play of language. It is intricate, intentional and most of all, rich in linguistic depth. Being the language renowned for its romance and sincerity, Arabic is my greatest form of inspiration.
Which book is your favourite to give as a gift?
I often find poetry collections to make beautiful gifts, given they are immensely accessible, timeless and their often beautiful covers make wonderful keepsakes. While gifting is extremely personal to the giftee, I would say any collections of Rumi are always well-loved.
What inspired your piece?
My piece was inspired by a multitude of media forms: novels, film, music, poetry, collage, etc.
Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water was a beacon of inspiration in the writing process. She is a literary genius in putting the complexity of the diasporic experience into a piece of creative non-fiction.
My second vignette, Al-Ba7r (pronounced Al Ba-hr) was inspired by the song featured as the epigraph: Nassam Alayna Hawa by Fairuz. I had attended a screening of her film, Bint al Harres, which features this song. I was familiar with the song beforehand, however watching it performed in the setting of the Lebanese seaside, and hearing everyone singing along in unison, transformed it to an experience permanently engrained in my memory.
Does writing your own stories affect what you choose to read?
Yes and no… Research is a significant part of my writing process, and so I do read to garner inspiration and fuel a sort of curiosity that brews when developing my ideas into a piece. However, I also do the reverse of this, and read many works that do not particularly align with my writing. I think that is the beauty of being a reader as well as a writer, to read outside the scope of your practice.
What is your favourite book of all time?
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. I first read it on a beach vacation a few years ago, and it is one of those pieces of literary mastery that stick with you forever. It was the first book where I truly identified with the author, with the characters, with the story, with it all.
Al Bint La 3inda Makan
{The Daughter has No Place}
“فزعانة يا قلبي أكبر بهالغربة ما تعرفني بلادي
خدني خدني خدني على بلادي.
I'm scared, my heart, to grow up in this estrangement, my home wouldn't recognise me
Take me, take me, take me home.”
— Nassam Alayna El Hawa, Fairuz
Cedrus Libnani
Cascading in luminance behind the shadows of suburbia, the blue in the sky turned clementine and invited the local cockatoos to settle on the clothing line of Jido’s backyard.
“Ahla wa sahlan,” rolled off his tongue, as he smoothed Capilano honey over the milled grains of khibis left over from lunch. Honey dripped down the spoon and into the seams between his fingers before he tossed it into the sink.
Mum and Tayta chuckled as he made his way to greet his feathered mates on the back veranda. You could see Tayta’s youth in the maple of Mum’s laughing eyes and Mum’s wisdom in the folds framing Tayta’s lips. They were indistinguishable.
Standing near the door, I planted a kiss on Jido’s cool cheek. He patted me on the back of my shoulder, his leaning palm leaving a kiss of aged nectar on the collar of my shirt. I took no notice of the premature stain I would eventually spend an evening scrubbing clean. I did however, take notice of the foam groves of my Havanias, imprinting the dry skin of my heels.
“Those birds were the first to welcome him in this country,” Tayta said as the ceramic ahwa cup clinked onto the coffee table. “Back home, in the montane forests, it was the finches. They would sit above our heads in the branches of the cedar trees.”
It was an image of fading antiquity, that cedar tree. The cedrus libnani, rooted in dinner table tales of the motherland with the strength of centuries at its core. It respirated in the scent of the badounis patch in Jido’s back garden, between the lemon tree and the weathered wooden chicken pen.
In the tales of the cedrus libnani, I was neither here nor there.
A singular tree armoured in a steady bark of nobility. It extended its fringes and branches of foliage to me and tickled beneath my fingertips. Bowing my head in amusement, my shoulders raised, eyes squinted, grinned. I sought the scent of its pines in the faint fragrance of the Wattle trees that would ride the breeze of the late-November nights. It was a friend of the songbirds and spruces, who whistled in conversation with the silkworms and seed bugs as they harvested each other’s company.
The sun’s rays warmed the back of my head, and the ground beneath soaked me deeper into the core of its being. Moist soils brushed between cascades of unshakeable roots tunneled in all directions and all its might aligned with the structure of my bones beneath muscle and skin.
I had never met the cedrus libani, but I could read the motions of its dialect on the bottle of rosewater Tayta would add into the shoy she served her visitors on Eid. I could only speak its tongue in frustrated stutters, but was fluent when it was sung in off-tune harmonies with my cousins on layliyeh dancefloors. In the company of my parents, and my kholtos and kholos, and my 3amtos and 3amos, and my Taytas and Jidos, and my cousins and my siblings, I was mostly intimately acquainted with the cedrus libani.
The call to the prayer of dusk bounced off the walls of Tayta’s living room, the kiss of honey now stained on my collar. Dad switched off the TV and made his way to the second living room, ordained and spared for special occasions. He unfolded three prayer mats, reciting tasbeeh in a quiet hum as the rest of us readied ourselves for the Maghreb prayer.
Water gushed over the squeak of the bathroom sink, and through the crack in the door I watched Jido as he guided the water from his right fingertips to cleanse himself for prayer. The residues of local honey and khibis washed from his hands, spiralling in a steady stream down the drain.
Outside, the cockatoos had left a trail of feathers above the wilted Eucalyptus leaves. Mum now stood at the sink beside her own, scrubbing honey off the spoon before they joined Dad down the hallway.
I was the last to join the prayer, silently peeling my feet out of my Havaianas. As I stood firm on the woven cushion of the mat, my shoulder brushing Mum’s beside me, I too, was kin to my very own ecosystem.
Al-Ba7er
I imagine my daughter, not yet born, swimming in the Levantine Sea.
Floating in empyrean, the salt of the seaside stings the hair on the back of her neck. It seeps through the pores of her skin, melted like butterscotch left in the sand. The waves weave through her fine hair outstretched in tendrils just like my own, and they whisper in the rustle of the shells and seaweed at shore.
Her cheeks are round rose petals, flushed by the kiss of the wind. Above the waters of the motherland, she is akin to the elements of the sands and soils beneath her. Warda floats like her ancestors hold a grip of maternal grace, smooth under the milky surface of her calves and forearms. She exists with such ease, her steady breath in tune with the ripples of the water.
I would recite sparrow-soft prayers under the moonlight of Fajr for moments like these:
Ya Allah, Ar-Rahmān, grant her the chivalry and nobility of her foremothers. Ya Allah, Al-Latif, sustain the softness of her heart. Ya Allah, Al-Ḥayy, conduct the vitality in the hum of her slumber.
The fragrance of her winsome joy is floral beneath the salty notes of the wind, and it reminds of the time she asked me the meaning of her name.
“Rose, in Arabic,” I told her as I peeled her an orange from the tree in our backyard. We were sitting beneath its shade, an impromptu tea party for just the two of us. “Because the pink of your cheeks are little petals.” She let out a giggle sweeter than the juice dripping from my palms. Leaving the crust of her labneh sandwich on the tray beside the lamingtons and fig jam, she rested her head on my lap. “I always knew you’d be Warda.”
Now she is here, and she binds in balance with the coast of the motherland, meeting with the trinkets of the ocean floor. The bend of her smile looks just like my mother’s: pouted and pink, and at the sight, I feel the very same form under my nose. The shape of her nose, however, perfectly aligns with the shadow of her father’s.
Last summer, he taught Warda to boogie-board the waves at Balmoral Beach. Six years old and she would dive head-first into the waves, racing her father away from the shallows. Each time she tumbled into the sand, she would leap back on her feet and glide back into the deep. She quickly learnt she’d have to plank onto the board at the very second the water began to curl towards the shore. It was as though she had unlocked the secret to life. I believe she did.
On the scorching Mediterranean sands, she hops towards me just as she did back then. White sand sits in clusters on her knees and chin, and in the distance behind her stand the mountains capes of Al-Minyeh.
Down by the port, the sea men glisten in gold droplets of sun dew, and one plucks the strings of his Oud guitar to the melody of Fairuz’s Nassam Alayna El Hawa. The sound waves and sea waves create a symphony of summer. It awakens the hearts of the sunbakers and sandworms, our souls yearning in union for this moment to last forever. To keep us home forever.
She plants a kiss on my cheek, touched by the lips of my mother and the nose of my partner, and the chill of their touch against my solar skin takes me back to the day I first felt the waves of the motherland. For the sea is for her children and will always be home.
Qamar
I first felt the Moon’s gaze when I was five. It was the first night I had slept in a room of my own and the oversized mattress refused to soften for the weight of my restless slumber. My older brother now slept down the freakishly silent hallway and waiting for the morning was like watching paint dry. When the night troubled me, Dad had taught me to cup my hands and recite my prayers, and so I held them in the burrow beneath my creased linen quilt. My whispers were in a language I didn’t quite understand, yet “Sadaqallahul azim” bounced off my palms and melted into a yawn as I shifted back to my pillow.
That’s when I felt her. She beamed down
down,
down the windowsill in silken silvers and orchestrated a cicada symphony to profess I was her child.
Each night since, she would bring starlit solitude to the hostile cradle I hesitated to call home. She would race me from the car window on drowsy drives from swim lessons at Olympic Park and watched Mum’s hands weave my damp curls while I fumbled over the ink of my Arabic textbook. Frustration would boil my ears scarlet as the words lazily defrosted from my tongue.
“Have patience, alba,” Mum would say. “You just need to feel the rhythm of it. Run your finger along the page and sound it out, word by word.”
How could I ease into the language of my foremothers when it refused to embrace my foreign tongue? I spoke in diaspora and paid the price of humiliation.
By fourteen, I grew tired of trying to squeeze into Arabic and banished my textbooks to the top shelf of the bookcase. Untethered to my mother tongue, I became numb to its motion beneath my skin. I buried it deep in amber soil and patted it down,
down,
down beneath the bottlebrush and banksia.
Still, it remained in motion, pulled by the whispering force of the Moon. I remained able to read, although the words bore no substance, the ritual of recitation had permanently imprinted the flesh of my heart. It would drip from memorised prayers and spill with the endearment of my elders. The voice of the motherland became a seasonal luxury I timidly embraced, only in the starlit solitude of the Moon.
On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, the Moon told me her name was Qamar. Preserved as the fifty-fourth chapter of God’s final decree, her name was destined for eternal recitation. She was a gift for measuring the phases of time and a vessel of Al-Jalīl to sustain noble prophets in times of uncertainty. Qamar was the ultimate gift of solace and had chosen me amongst the ancestors of my faith and family line.
The night Tayta migrated to the Southern Shire shores, Qamar began to collect the tales and wisdoms of the motherland and store them in a pouch of oud and stardust. Then, she would extract the dew of the elderberry flowers that collected snow on the mountains and adorned the dark suburban night with the scent of motherland. This way, her children always slept under the embrace of home.
“There is no need to strain yourself in the search of belonging,” she wrote in the stars. “You, ya binti, belong to every inch of the land beneath my gaze, just as those here, before and after you.”
Al-Qamar was blue when it welcomed me into this world. I wonder, will she be blue on the day I depart it? as I deciphered the yearns of Arabic singers on my drive home from work. My left fingers tapped to the beat of the drumbakah booming from the stereo and my right arm rested against the semi-opened window. I learned to cling to the words I understood to decipher the ones I had not yet recognised.
At twenty, Al-Qamar now leans as my night prayers have grown more ardent with sincerity. She glimmers with the pride of my foremothers through the kitchen shutters as I trace my finger over the label of the bottle of may zahar I mix into freshly brewed shoy. And she watches with most pleasure as the deep molasses of my eyes reflect her light just as the Moonchildren before me.
Discover the other Literary Showcase 2026 Finalists at the voting page.
