Sanam Mahloudji is a writer from Los Angeles and Iran, living in London.

Her debut novel THE PERSIANS was published on January 30, 2025 in the UK (Fourth Estate) and March 4, 2025 in the US (Scribner). You can purchase everywhere books are sold…Click here for a few ideas for the US, and for the UK.

Read about THE PERSIANS more here.

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2025

“Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians is exuberant, whip-smart, infused with melancholy, tragicomic, huge-hearted and sharp-toothed – like the proud Valiat sisters, aunts, mothers and nieces who populate its pages.  Seventy years of Iranian and diaspora history are the backdrop to this swirling portrait of an emigre family, glinting with read-out-loud sentences.  A joy of a debut novel by the real deal.” —David Mitchell

“Mahloudji writes with a wisdom and confidence rarely seen in a debut, and her sharp observations are humorous and poignant…[T]his is more than a tale of Middle East meets west. Mahloudji is exploring where identity comes from… Multigenerational stories of family anguish and upheaval remain as popular as ever, from Abraham Verghese’s beautiful The Covenant of Water, to the quiet excellence of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Elif Shafak’s stunning exploration of generational trauma, The Island of Missing Trees. THE PERSIANS earns a place alongside these heavyweights. It is as funny as it is moving, as perceptive as it is pithy.” —The Guardian

Also in translation in Germany (Piper), the Netherlands (Ambo Anthos), Hungary (Europa), Croatia (Fraktura) and Romania (Polirom).

Sanam won a Pushcart Prize for her story “Slut Days” first published in the Idaho Review. The story was reprinted in the 2023 Pushcart anthology and distributed by W.W. Norton. Sanam’s fiction also appears in the Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Passages North and elsewhere. She was nominated for a 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Sanam is represented by Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander Associates.