Aliyeh Ataei

Aliyeh Ataei is an Iranian-Afghan author and screenwriter whose books have won major literary awards in Iran, including Mehregan-e-Adab for Best Novel. She was born in 1981 in Iran, and grew up in Darmian, a border region situated between the South Khorasan Province in Iran and the Farah province in Afghanistan. Ataei was a border dweller, with part of her family living in Iran and the other part in Afghanistan. Widely recognized as a strong adherent of women’s rights, Ataei is deeply influenced by personal accounts of growing up as a female minority in Iran, and her work takes on themes such as identity and the emigre life. She finished her high school in Birjand and left for the capital to continue her studies at Tehran University of Art, where she earned an  undergraduate and a graduate degree in Screenplay Writing. Ataei’s short stories and essays have been translated and published in numerous American and French magazines, including Guernica, Words Without Borders, Michigan Quarterly Review, Adi Magazine, and the Kenyon Review. Her collection of personal essays, titled Kursorkhi in Persian, was published by Gallimard in April 2023 as La Frontière des Oubliés.

Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer whose short stories and essays have appeared in Plenitude Magazine, Southeast Review, and Minor Literature[s], among other journals. His poems have been anthologized in Odes to Our Undoing (Risk Press) and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press). He is the winner of the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.