Description
We are so pleased to present a talk with Sanam Mahloudji, whose riotously funny and moving debut novel, The Persians, was recently shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025.
‘The Persians is a glorious feat of juggling… this darkly funny, richly satisfying, wonderful debut’ – Sarah Winman, author of Still Life
Meet the women of the Valiat family: in Iran, they were somebodies; in America, they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution, with only her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, Niaz, for company.
Across the ocean in America, her daughters have built new lives for themselves: Shirin is a high-flying event planner in Houston, and Seema, once a dreamy idealist, is languishing as a bored housewife in Los Angeles. Her other granddaughter, Bita, is a disillusioned law student living in New York, searching for meaning by giving away her worldly belongings.
When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry, Bita ends up bailing Shirin out of jail, and the family’s brittle upper class veneer is cracked wide open, and the women must restore the family name to its former glory. But what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never even mattered?
Spanning from 1940s Iran into a splintered 2000s, what emerges is a darkly funny, deeply moving and profoundly searching portrait of a unique family in crisis.
Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran, which she left during the Islamic Revolution. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The Persians is her debut novel.
She’ll be interviewed by Sara Jafari, a British-Iranian editor and author of The Mismatch and People Change. She has worked in the publishing industry for over eight years, and is currently Senior Editor at Bloomsbury Children’s Books.
Ticket price includes a glass of wine or a soft drink.