Congratulations to COURAGE to WRITE grantee Sahar Delijani, whose novel For Every Person You Kill is forthcoming from Melville House! This is especially exciting, as this is the project for which Sahar was awarded a grant.
Spanning from the aftermath of the 1988 Massacre to the Woman Life Freedom uprising in Iran, For Every Person You Kill follows Neda, a writer living in New York City, on her journey to uncover her parents’ years of imprisonment as political dissidents and the fragments of her own hidden past. Through a narrative interwoven with interview scripts, what begins as a search for memory becomes a visceral reckoning with generational trauma, political persecution, and the legacies of love and survival a dictatorship tried—and failed—to bury.
Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree, an internationally acclaimed novel, translated into thirty-two languages and published in more than seventy-five countries. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, McSweeney’s, BOMB, Jewish Currents, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the de Groot Foundation COURAGE to WRITE Grant, the Society of Authors and Author’s Foundation Grant, and of fellowships at Hawthornden Foundation, Tin House, Art Omi and Hedgebrook. Her work has furthermore been shortlisted for the Granum Prize and nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Essay series. Delijani has appeared on ABC News, Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR and Channel 4 News to discuss Iran and the political realities of the region. Born in Iran, Delijani lives in New York City. Her second novel, For Every Person You Kill, is forthcoming from Melville House in Spring 2027.
Follow Sahar on Instagram, @sahardelijani