Author
Azareen van Der Vliet Oloomi
Associated Country
United States
Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi is an Iranian-American novelist and essayist known for fiction that blends literary experimentation with themes of exile, identity, memory, and psychological intensity.
She was born in 1983 in Los Angeles and spent parts of her childhood living in Iran, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and Scotland. She studied at the University of California, San Diego, and later earned an MFA from Brown University. Her multinational upbringing and multilingual background strongly inform her work, which often explores displacement and the fragmented nature of identity.
She is the author of several novels, including Fra Keeler (2012), Call Me Zebra (2018), and Savage Tongues (2021). Call Me Zebra won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and established her as a major voice in contemporary literary fiction. Her writing is known for its dense, poetic style and its willingness to push narrative form into surreal, psychologically charged territory while still engaging deeply with emotional and political realities.
Across her work, Oloomi is recognized for combining intellectual ambition with raw emotional force, often exploring how language, trauma, and migration shape the way people understand themselves and others.
She was born in 1983 in Los Angeles and spent parts of her childhood living in Iran, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and Scotland. She studied at the University of California, San Diego, and later earned an MFA from Brown University. Her multinational upbringing and multilingual background strongly inform her work, which often explores displacement and the fragmented nature of identity.
She is the author of several novels, including Fra Keeler (2012), Call Me Zebra (2018), and Savage Tongues (2021). Call Me Zebra won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and established her as a major voice in contemporary literary fiction. Her writing is known for its dense, poetic style and its willingness to push narrative form into surreal, psychologically charged territory while still engaging deeply with emotional and political realities.
Across her work, Oloomi is recognized for combining intellectual ambition with raw emotional force, often exploring how language, trauma, and migration shape the way people understand themselves and others.
Books
Savage Tongues 2021
At seventeen, Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, travels to Andalusia in southern Spain—a historically Islamic and Sephardic space—to reconnect with her estranged father. Instead, she is left in the...
Call Me Zebra 2018
Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. Alone and in exile, she leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United...
Fra Keeler 2012
A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to...