For years now, if you’ve had half an eye on Australia’s high-stakes cultural turf (long the jealous province of a white male monolith), Michael Mohammed Ahmad has not been one to be overlooked or sold short. Founder of the Western Sydney literacy movement Sweatshop, a regular and uncompromising agitator at writers’ festivals against the complacency of White Australian readers, and the acclaimed author of novels like The Lebs, Ahmad’s work and name vibrates with an energy born of a deep, lived knowledge of this country’s racial and ethnic violence – and a will to name its ugliest forms, explode them, and rebut them with imaginative bite.

Johnny Nassar, Joshua Thompson and Yvonne Huang in the Demon. Photo © Prudence Upton.

Running for just three nights as part of the second season of Sydney’s 2022 UnWrapped festival, The Demon is Ahmad’s first serious foray into writing for the stage. Ten years in the making, Ahmad has drawn upon the Chinese, Arab, Anglo-Celtic settler and Indigenous backgrounds of the creative team to conjure an allegorical Australia that sits beneath this;...