Yassmin Abdel-Magied facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Yassmin Abdel-Magied
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Abdel-Magied in 2016
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Khartoum, Sudan
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| Alma mater | University of Queensland (BE; Honours) |
| Occupation | Mechanical engineer, media presenter, writer |
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese–Australian media presenter and writer, who had an early career as a mechanical engineer. She was named Young Queenslander of the Year in 2010 and Queensland Australian of the Year in 2015 for her engagement in community work. Abdel-Magied has been based in the United Kingdom since 2017, after her comments about Sharia on TV and a social media post on Anzac Day led to her being widely attacked in Australian media, a petition calling for her sacking from ABC TV, and numerous death threats on social media.
Contents
Early life
Family
Yassmin Midhat Abdel-Magied was born in Khartoum, Sudan. As skilled migrants, her parents moved to Brisbane, Australia with her when she was aged 18 months in late 1992. This was after the 1989 Sudanese coup d'état in which the Islamist military toppled the democratically elected government and brought in harsh laws, such as the policing of women's clothing and mandating the speaking and teaching of Arabic in universities. Abdel-Magied holds dual Australian and Sudanese nationality.
Abdel-Magied's father, Midhat Abdel-Magied, completed a PhD in electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, and subsequently studied Information Technology in Australia. Yassmin's mother, Faiza El-Higzi, was a qualified architect in Sudan, and now holds postgraduate degrees across various disciplines. Yassmin has a younger brother.
In November 2019, Abdel-Magied announced her engagement with a photo of her diamond ring on Instagram. She has since married a British man.
Education
Abdel-Magied attended primary school at the Islamic College of Brisbane and the independent Christian high school John Paul College, at which there was no policy against wearing a hijab. She studied mechanical engineering at the University of Queensland, graduating with a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering with First-Class Honours in 2011.
Community work and early career (2007–2017)
As high school students in 2007, Abdel-Magied and two others founded "Youth Without Borders" (YWB) in Australia, and she continued as chairperson until 2016. In 2007, she was named Young Australian Muslim of the Year. She also participated in other groups/committees and in 2010 was named Young Queenslander of the Year.
From 2012 until 2016, she worked for multinational engineering companies based in Australia. In 2013, Abdel-Magied wrote a journal article about working "On the rigs" in the Griffith Review.
In 2015, Abdel-Magied contributed as a member of the Federal ANZAC Centenary Commemoration Youth Working Group.
After Abdel-Magied was named Queensland Young Australian of the Year in 2015, Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop appointed her to the Council for Australian-Arab Relations (CAAR). In late 2016, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) sent Abdel-Magied, as a CAAR board member, to several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt and Sudan, to promote Australia.
Media activities (2014–2017)
In December 2014, Abdel-Magied presented a fourteen-minute TED talk at TEDxSouthBank in Brisbane, entitled What does my headscarf mean to you?, which was chosen as one of TED's top-ten ideas of 2015.
From August 2016 to 1 July 2017, Abdel-Magied presented ABC TV human-interest show Australia Wide until the show was cancelled due to ABC program restructuring.
Other activities on Australian media have included Triple J (radio), Radio National, F1 Racing (2016 podcast), SBS TV The Truth About Racism (2017) and ABC TV's Hard Chat (2016–2017).
Post-relocation career (2018– )
Living in London, Abdel-Magied continued to take her security very seriously, taking measures to protect her online and telephone presence. In 2018 she said there had been "a concerted effort to ruin my life, and nobody stopped them. Not the government, not advocacy groups, no one. I was out there alone".
In 2018, Abdel-Magied presented six six-minute episodes of an Islamic headwear fashion program on ABC iview. In April of the same year, Abdel-Magied appeared in her acting debut in the SBS TV series Homecoming Queens, made in her Australian hometown of Brisbane, about the lives of two young women dealing with life after major illness. Abdel-Magied played a character described as "a conceited social media lifestyle guru".
On 23 April 2018, Abdel-Magied appeared on the UK-based podcast The Guilty Feminist on the topic of identity.
At the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2018, Abdel-Magied spoke of the grief she felt, for the loss of both her engineering career as well as her youthful optimism and innocence.
She is a contributor to Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, and has participated in associated events in London.
In April 2019, Abdel-Magied spoke on The Bookshow on ABC Radio National about her debut novel You Must Be Layla. The target audience is young readers, and the plot centres on a Sudanese girl who struggles to fit into her new private school. She spoke of the additional freedom afforded by fiction in expressing themes important to her.
In January 2020, the Australia Council for the Arts announced Abdel-Magied as a recipient of a A$20,000 international development writing grant and a six-month residency at the Keesing Studio in Paris.
In May 2022, she published a collection of essays entitled Talking About a Revolution. It is divided into two sections, The Private and Public Self, and Systems and Society, with all of the writings linked by a broad interpretation of the term "revolution". She spoke about the book in conversation with Sisonke Msimang via live video at the Sydney Writers Festival on 21 May, and also appeared on ABC News Breakfast. In one of the essays, she writes about considering giving up her Australian citizenship, partly because she has "a real issue with the broader system of borders and citizenship and the way that inequality is baked into the nation-state"; she wanted to provoke reflection on the question "what does it mean to have an Australian citizenship?". She said she had built a life in London that she was happy with.
Works
Blog.
Story in a collection. Biography. (reprinted on The Guardian website on 6 July 2017)
Edited version of a speech given at the Melbourne Writers Festival. YA Fiction.
