Published in 2019
192 pages
Sabrina Mahfouz was raised in London and Cairo and has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King’s Alumni Arts & Culture Award for inspiring change in the industry.
She was also nominated for the Inspiring Change Award at the 2018 Women in the Creative Industries Awards and her Snapchat series for C4’s Ackley Bridge won a Broadcast Digital Award. She has been shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Award for Performance Poetry and has won a Sky Arts Academy Award for Poetry and a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights. Sabrina’s theatre work includes Chef, a Fringe First Award winner; Dry Ice, for which she was nominated in The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence; With a Little Bit of Luck, which won Best Drama Production in the BBC Radio & Music Awards 2019; Clean, a Herald Angel Award winner which transferred to New York and her adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s celebrated YA novel Noughts & Crosses for Pilot Theatre tours the UK throughout 2019.
She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa (based on the book by Diane Hofmeyr) won a 2018 Off West End Award. Her poetry collection, How You Might Know Me, was a 2017 Guardian Best Summer Read.
Sabrina is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year, a London’s Big Read finalist and selected by Emma Watson for her feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf. She is an essay contributor to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant.
Sabrina founded and runs Great Wash Workshops, helping working class writers access UK arts funding and co-founded the Critics of Colour Collective to help ensure fairer representation in UK arts criticism. Sabrina has been the Creative in Residence at The Hospital Club; Poet in Residence at Cape Farewell; Leverhulme Playwright in Residence and Associate Artist at the Bush Theatre. She has facilitated writing workshops in prisons, schools and charities for the Royal Court, the National Theatre, The Poetry Society, the World Economic Forum, Clean Break and many others.
What is this book about?
Working-class artists continue to be hugely underrepresented in the arts industries, though they make up a third of the British population. These professions are already notoriously hard to get into, but working class artists face extra challenges, from unpaid work reinforcing social disparity, to prejudice. How do we break this cycle of inequality in the arts?
In Smashing It, leading musicians, playwrights, visual artists, filmmakers and writers share how they overcame obstacles, from the financial to the philosophical, to make it in the arts. Edited by acclaimed poet and playwright Sabrina Mahfouz, it celebrates the achievements of working class artists in Britain, from the global takeover of Grime musicians to the literary powerhouses pushing representative narratives, and empowers those who will be a part of tomorrow’s cultural landscape.
Includes a guide section on how to make it in the arts, and contributions from Kerry Hudson, DJ Target, Riz Ahmed, Bridget Minamore, Anthony Anaxagorou, Salena Godden, Madani Younis and Bryony Kimmings, among others.
