By Nazanine Nouri
“The Persians” – the debut novel by the Iranian-born American author, U.K.-based Sanam Mahloudji has been shortlisted for the 30th Women’s Prize for Fiction, the U.K.’s leading award for female novelists.
The prize recognizes excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing, and is awarded to the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom.
“The Persians” is a family drama told through the eyes of five passionate women from three generations of a prestigious Persian family whose fate becomes entwined with the history of modern Iran. The five women consist of matriarch – a frail and elderly woman who decides to remain in Iran at the time of the Revolution; her two daughters, who have fled their homeland and built new lives for themselves in Los Angeles and Houston; and their daughters, one of whom lives in New York while the other is stuck in post-revolutionary Iran.
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“I realized I had a whole family and history and culture I wanted to write about, and it was something that I could only do in a novel,” said Mahloudji in an interview published on the Women’s Prize for Fiction website. “It also became the perfect vessel in which to explore my complicated political and personal, and even philosophical, feelings about the United States and Iran, about immigration and diaspora, as well as my otherwise hard-to-articulate feelings about family and self.”
The book has been receiving strong reviews.
“Mahloudji writes with a wisdom and confidence rarely seen in a debut, and her sharp observations are humorous and poignant,” wrote The Guardian in January.
“As you would expect in a novel of migration and revolution, identity is a huge theme, but this is more than a tale of Middle East meets west,” The Guardian said. “Mahloudji is exploring where identity comes from: the stories we choose to tell, and whether those stories are a reality or based only on how we perceive the past in order to fit our own agenda.”
Mahloudji was born in Tehran and left Iran for Los Angeles after the Revolution. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for her story “Slut Days,” first published in the Idaho Review. She was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, and the Kenyon Review, among others. She lives in London with her husband and two children. The Persians is her debut novel.
