Having escaped Iran with her father during the revolution, she has grown up as an “other” in the United States just post-9/11 where having been driven from her home has marked her as a threat in the eyes of Americans. Zebra is the story of a young woman with an immense passion for literature who is carrying the scars of a long history of violence and displacement and how she sets out on a literary ‘Grand Tour of Exile’ to better understand her lack of place in the world. To disappear into literature seems a vacation to many, but in Call Me Zebra, the second novel by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, this is a defense against the traumas of the world. ‘ I hail from the land of not belonging, directly beyond the frontier of any nation.’ She attended Brown University and the University of California San Diego, and now lives in the Chicago area. Call Me Zebra is being translated into half a dozen languages and Fra Keeler was published in Italian by Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently teaches in the M.F.A.
Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, among other places.
She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction to Catalonia, Spain. Oloomi is also the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project). Her 2018 novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the John Gardner Award for Fiction, and was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award. Nominations: PEN/Open Book, Emerging AuthorĪzareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an award-winning Iranian-American author. Awards: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Whiting Awards, 5 Under 35Įducation: Brown University, University of California San Diego
0 kommentar(er)
