Salar Abdoh is an Iranian novelist and essayist. He is the author of the novels The Poet Game (2000), Opium (2004), Tehran At Twilight (2014), and the editor and translator of the anthology Tehran Noir (2014). He is also a director of the graduate program in Creative Writing at the City College of New York at the City University of New York.
Early life
Salar Abdoh was born in Tehran, Iran and also spent some time in England. When Abdoh was fourteen his family was forced to leave Iran for the US. Abdoh earned an undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and received a Master's from the City College of New York.
Career
Abdoh's first novel, The Poet Game, focuses on a young agent sent by a top-secret Iranian government agency to infiltrate a group of Islamic extremists in New York in order to keep them from acts of terror that might draw the US into a war in the Middle East. Though the book was published in 2000, it received far greater attention following the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. His second novel, Opium (2004) tells the story of a young American who used to work as a drug-runner along the Afghan/Iran border during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Years later, living in New York and trying to keep a low profile, his past suddenly catches up with him as the US is gearing up to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Abdoh's third novel, Tehran At Twilight, a literary thriller reminiscent of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, depicts the limits of friendship, and betrayal, in a time of war and after. Simultaneously with this novel, in 2014 Abdoh also edited and translated Tehran Noir, a collection of noir stories from various Iranian writers about Tehran. By 2020, with the Publication of Out of Mesopotamia, a war novel based on his own experiences in the wars of the Middle East (Iraq & Syria), Abdoh told the story of a journalist who, as the NYTimes book review noted, "Torn between war and art ... chooses both."
Abdoh also co-wrote the play Quotations from a Ruined City with his older brother, Reza Abdoh, the world famous avant-garde theater director. The play was first produced in 1994.
References
External links
Salarabdoh.com
On taking a bullet for another in war
On the fight against ISIS at Tel Afar
On homelessness and hunger in America
On being a female journalist in Tehran
The Millions' article
Article on Martyrs and commanders
Article on cost of war in the Middle East
Author statement on the writing of Tehran At Twilight
Salar Abdoh's introduction to the Tehran Noir anthology: The Seismic City
An Article by Salar Abdoh about a public execution in Tehran
Salar Abdoh about covering the 'War on Drugs' in Afghanistan
Fiction by Salar Abdoh about the Iran-Iraq War
Salar Abdoh on Majed Neisi about the Afghan civil war
Salar Abdoh on the 2009 demonstrations in Tehran
Fiction by Salar Abdoh in Tremors-Anthology of Iranian-American Fiction, Asia Society, 2013 Faber & Faber author page Interview Excerpt from The Poet Game Essay on September 11 Three part series of articles on Iran: Moving Violations Vanishing Point Irrational Waiting NEA Writer's Corner Writer's Statement
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Iranian emigrants to the United States University of California, Berkeley alumni City College of New York alumni Writers from Tehran Iranian male short story writers 21st-century Iranian short story writers 21st-century American male writers