Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an Iranian American novelist and professor of creative writing. Born in Iran, she grew up in multiple countries before settling in the United States. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Her debut novel Fra Keeler (2012) announced a distinctive experimental voice, and her second novel Call Me Zebra (2018) brought her widespread critical recognition. Call Me Zebra follows Zebra, a young Iranian exile and self-proclaimed 'last in a line of anarchist autodidacts,' on a journey through Spain and Italy as she retraces her dead father's intellectual and literary obsessions. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2019 and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was praised for its philosophical passion, its black comedy, and its deeply original treatment of exile, memory, and the consolations of literature. Van der Vliet Oloomi's subsequent novel Savage Tongues (2021) continues her engagement with themes of trauma, memory, and female desire. Her work is notable for its intellectual ambition, its stylistic exuberance, and its radical commitment to literature as a form of truth-telling about displacement and survival.