Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde

Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde is a Swedish-Iranian author born in Tehran in 1983. She came to Sweden as a refugee as a child and grew up there, studying philosophy at Uppsala University before becoming a novelist. She is also a business executive and entrepreneur. Her debut novel What We Owe (Swedish: Vad vi är skyldiga varandra, 2018; translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel) is a short, intense novel narrated by an Iranian-Swedish woman dying of cancer who is estranged from her daughter and must decide whether to maintain that estrangement or reconnect before she dies. The novel won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2019 and was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was praised for its emotional precision, its spare prose, and its unflinching exploration of the weight of historical trauma on family relationships. Hashemzadeh Bonde lives in Stockholm and divides her time between Sweden and the United States.