"I found myself on a stage at the age of 25 with a piece of paper in my hand, shaking like I was connected to the core of the earth..."

Playwright, poet and polymath Sabrina Mahfouz tells the story of one moment that changed her whole life, and encourages you to take the leap. In her heart-on-sleeve piece Sabrina explains how she used to think that the only people who could pick up the mic were men. Until she did it herself.

Sabrina Mahfouz was raised in London and Cairo. Named as a 'modern Renaissance woman' by The Scotsman and 'one of the rising stars of new British playwrighting' by The Herald, her work includes the plays With a Little Bit of Luck (Paines Plough) and Clean (Traverse Theatre), which transferred to New York in 2014; the poetry collection How You Might Know Me (Out-Spoken Press); and the literary anthology The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write (Saqi Books), which is currently longlisted for the Grand Prix Literary Associations Prize.

Her work appears in award-winning anthologies including The Good Immigrant (Unbound); This Is Not a Border (Bloomsbury) and Here I Stand (Walker Books). She is currently working with Cambridge University Philosophy Department to write poetry around consent and is the librettist for an opera adaptation of Woman at Point Zero (Royal Opera House/Shubbak/Aldeburgh).