Ep. 53 Sushi Das on seeking truths, "deranged marriage" and raising strong daughters.

Sushi Das is an award-winning British Australian journalist of more than 25 years, spending much of her career at The Age, where she held a series of senior reporting and editing positions.


She is the winner of two Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards including Best Columnist (2005) and currently works as a freelance columnist and as a researcher for RMIT ABC Fact Check.

A brilliant writer and storyteller, Sushi is the author of Deranged Marriage - an affectionate, often hilarious, memoir of growing up in London in the 1970s in a strict and traditional Indian household, she raged against the control of her father and tried desperately to avoid an arranged marriage. 

Education was Sushi’s passport to freedom and it enabled her to escape to Australia in her 20’s to live the life she wanted for herself, and to find her own place in the world on her terms, as she navigated the tug between Eastern expectations and Western desires. 

Like so many of us, she has grappled with parental and cultural pressures that clash with her own deep needs for independence and justice.

In this episode, Sushi reflects on the role of mothers in raising strong daughters, in not repeating the patterns of the past, and in letting your children be free to emerge into who they are - as she says, “I do not own my daughter. I am her custodian. I am the bow and she is the arrow.”

Guest: Sushi Das
Socials: Twitter, LinkedIn

Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine Grummet
Producer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax

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