Join us for a special lunchtime chat from AAWW’s green couch with Stockholm-based writer Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, whose US debut, What We Owe, is a gripping novella about a 50 year-old Iranian refugee whose terminal cancer diagnosis compels her brutal and bitter telling of her journey to Sweden after fleeing—or betraying—the revolution. Translated from the Dutch by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, What We Owe is “spare and devastating” (Kirkus). Tune in to our Facebook page at 1:00pm to watch Golnaz read from the book and discuss it with writer and journalist Roja Heydarpour. Grab your lunch, and pull up to our live chat!

TUNE IN TO THE LIVESTREAM
WEDNESDAY, OCT 17 | 1-1:20PM

Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde was born in Iran in 1983 and fled with her parents to Sweden as a young child. What We Owe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) is her first novel to be published in the US and will be published in 25 countries. Imbued with haunting prose and a deep sense of history, her slim, fierce novel is an unflinching look at how trauma and grief metabolize over time through the eyes of an immigrant woman striving to survive at all costs. Leni Zumas writes, “I read this ferocious novel in one sitting, enthralled by the rage of its narrator. Nahid confronts her own suffering with dark humor and noisy honesty, while taking aim at a patriarchal tradition that expects her to be silent.” Golnaz’s first book, She Is Not Me (Hon är inte jag) was published in Sweden in 2012. She is the founder and director of Inkludera Invest, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting marginalization in society by backing social entrepreneurs who have developed pragmatic solutions to social challenges. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and daughter. Check out an excerpt from the English translation of the book in Words Without Borders.

Roja Heydarpour is a writer and editor. Born in Iran and raised in New York City, she has worked for the Daily Beast, the New York Times, Al-Monitor, Columbia Global Reports, and Devex, among others. She also teaches citizenship classes at the Bay Ridge and Kensington branches of the Brooklyn Public Library, teaching a mix of students ranging from Chinese to Azari to Tajik to Pakistani and Bangladeshi. You can read her most recent piece about how Muslim-Americans mourn after the first generations of families die at Open City.

This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page at 1pm.

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