Photo by Jason Keith
Amir Ahmadi Arian was born in Ahvaz, Iran. he spent his childhood in the war zone of the Iran-Iraq war where his mother was a nurse in frontline hospitals.
Amir started his writing career in Iran in 2000. He has published two novels, a collection of stories, and a book of nonfiction in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy.
Amir left Iran in 2011 to undertake a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Since 2014 he has been writing exclusively in English. In this phase of his career, he has published short stories and essays in The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, LRB, Lithub, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, etc.
Amir earned an MFA in the NYU Creative Writing Program as The Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow Fellowship recipient of 2016 - 2018.
His first novel in English, Then The Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperVia/HarperCollins in March 2020.
He is an Assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University and lives in Ithaca, New York.