Siavash Saadlou
Siavash Saadlou is Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has been recognized by the 2023 Best American Essays series. His short stories, essays, and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, and Southeast Review, among other journals. He is the winner of the 2025 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction, the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. His writing has received support from Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, The BC Arts Council, and The Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Saadlou lives in Vancouver.
Writers & Books
Program History
2026 - Rising Star
Rising Stars
Selected by
Rawi Hage
Citation
“I had the rare privilege of reading Siavash Saadlou’s work, particularly his short fiction. His realism, intricately layered, has the authenticity of lived experience rendered with the acuity of an historian and the virtuosic skill of a born storyteller. The characters who inhabit his pages embody the many-faceted narratives of exile and war, while illuminating the delicate and dissonant condition of living between a foreign modernity and an oppressive theocracy. These stories capture a liminal existence with remarkable precision — its sadness and solitude, its modes of survival and defiance, and its quietly comic dimensions.”—2026 Rising Star Selector Rawi Hage