By Nazanine Nouri
Shida Bazyar — a German novelist and essayist of Iranian descent who wrote “The Nights are Quiet in Tehran” (translated into English by Ruth Martin) — has been shortlisted for the prestigious International Booker Prize 2026.
The International Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The 2026 shortlist of six books was announced on March 31st, and the winning book will be announced at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London on May 19.
“The pages of ‘The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran’ pulse with solidarities and betrayal, with heartache and humor,” said the International Booker Prize 2026 judges. “And for all exiles, migrants, once-and-future revolutionaries, Bazyar captures what it means to always live in hope.”
Bazyar’s novel traces the life of one family through four decades of change and through revolutions in Iran and Germany, focusing on how the past haunts and informs the present.
It is a well-reviewed story on revolution, oppression, resistance and the desire for freedom.
Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine, praised the novel as a “Denkmal [Monument] for a generation of exiles.”
Set between 1979 and 2009, it is a polyphonic novel with four different narrative voices that recount one family’s flight from and return to Iran. It moves through brief periods of the lives of each member of the family during that period, including: Behzad, a young communist revolutionary fighting for a new order after the Shah’s departure in 1979; Nahid, Behzad’s wife, who lives the life of a new immigrant with Behzad and their young children in Germany; Laleh, their exiled daughter, visiting a distant homeland with her mother Nahid; and Mo, Laleh’s brother, who is distressed by his parents’ grief and longing to return home. Together, they present a moving portrait of one family shaped by the course of history.
“The main thing I wanted was to understand my parents’ story,” said Bazyar in an interview with the International Booker Prize 2026 organizers. “The book isn’t autobiographical, but I spent many hours interviewing my parents for research, to find out what their political life was like in Iran, what their resistance looked like, and how they ended up fleeing to Germany, where I was born.”
Bazyar was born in Hermeskeil, Germany in 1988 into a family of Iranian political activists who had fled Iran in 1987 in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. She studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim and worked in youth education for many years before starting her literary career writing short stories in magazines and anthologies.
“The Nights are Quiet in Tehran” was Bazyar’s debut novel, and was originally published in German in 2016 under the title “Nacht sist es leise in Teheran.” She wrote most of it while she was still a student, spending hours watching videos of the 2009 protests, home videos from her trips to Iran, pictures of Khomeini’s return from exile, and of the women who demonstrated quite early on against the compulsory hijab. The novel won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize and Uwe Johnson Prize and has been translated into Dutch, Farsi, French and Turkish.
Bazyar is widely regarded as a major contemporary voice in German literature. She is part of a post-migrant literary movement and is especially important for bringing anti-racist discourse into literary fiction and Iranian-German perspectives into the mainstream.
Her second novel “Drei Kameradinnen” (2021) about friendship, racism and right-wing violence in Germany was praised for tackling systemic racism and social blind spots, combining literary complexity with political urgency and portraying friendship as a counterforce to trauma. It was translated into English under the title “Sisters in Arms” in 2023.
