About the Author
Sabah has authored two novels, Humeirah and Semi-Apes, both set in the Indian-ocean island of Mauritius where she was born. In 2024, her short story, Fading Mehndi won the Afritondo Short Story Prize.
Other short stories have been selected for publication in international competitions, namely the Small Islands Anthology Contest (Plaine Verte), the AfroYoung Adult Short Story Competition (Tara’s Hair), the Not-So-Normal-Narrators Contest (Shortlisted: Size of Rice), the Bristol Short Story Prize (Shortlisted: The Evil in Me), and the Afritondo Short Story Prize (Shortlisted: Dadima’s Key Ring). One of her nonfiction pieces (Dismantling Life) was also a semi-finalist in the Gabriele Rico Challenge for Creative Nonfiction, published in Reed Magazine in 2020. Her poetry can be found in Pepper Coast Lit, Jalada Africa, SetuMag, SpillWords, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and The Bangalore Review, among others.
Sabah’s multidisciplinary background in law, creative writing, and international human rights culminated in a PhD in Genocide Studies with a focus on the atrocities of the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979). Sabah also edits and manages Arts & Literature of the scholarly journal, Genocide Studies and Prevention, and hosts the podcast series on Genocide Studies, Not to Forgive, But to Understand, co-hosted with Luis Gonzalez-Aponte.
In 2020, Sabah was awarded the W. Morgan and Lou Claire Rose Fellowship for an MFA in Creative Writing in the United States where she now lives. After graduating from the program, she was awarded the 2024-2025 Postdoctoral Scholarship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Martin-Springer Institute in Northern Arizona University. In 2025, she was offered the position of Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (CGHR) at Rutgers University for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Sabah is now finalising a short story collection, Rubbing the Oil of the House in the Skin of Strangers, and working on a scholarly monograph, Law, Neuroscience, and Genocide Studies: A New Perspective of Genocide and Perpetrator Motive.
Sabah has previously lived in Malaysia, Maldives, and Kenya.
Selected Work
Short Stories
‘Plaine Verte’ in So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean & Pacific (Saqi Books, UK) 2018
Poetry
Creative Nonfiction
Scholarly Work
(2022) Sabah Carrim "Book Review: The Postcolonial
African Genocide Novel:Quests for Meaningfulness" Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 16: Iss. 1: 134–136
(2021) Sabah Carrim “Harsha Walia, Border and Rule" Journal of Refugee Studies: Vol 34, Iss. 4: 4585-4587
(2021) Sabah Carrim "Book Review: Perpetrator Cinema—Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary" Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 15: Iss. 2: 52–54
(2021) Sabah Carrim "Laws, Sausages, and Creating Tribunals" Journal of Perpetrator Research 4(1)
(2020) Sabah Carrim “Reconsidering the Classification of Perpetrators in instances of Genocide and Mass Atrocity: A focus on the Khmer Rouge Era.” Review of Human Rights 6(1): 1-23
(2018) Sabah Carrim “The Legacy of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil” Review of Human Rights 3(1) Winter 2017, 43-66
(2020) Sabah Carrim “Arts & Literature: The Grey Zone.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal Vol. 14 Iss. 3: 3–10
(2024) Sabah Carrim "Book Review: For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists: Literature in an Era of Capitalist Realism" Modern Language Review 119, no. 2 (2024): 250-252
(2024) Sabah Carrim "Neuroscientific Evidence in Trials of Young Perpetrators Involved in Armed Conflict and Mass Atrocity." Journal of Genocide Research, November, 1-22
Reviews of Sabah's Work
