Foreigner book nahid rachlin biography
Interview with Nahid Rachlin
Write a Bio.
Nahid Rachlin, born in Iran, came to the United States to attend college and stayed. She has been writing and publishing novels and short stories, in English. Among her publications are four novels, JUMPING OVER FIRE (City Lights), FOREIGNER (W.W. Norton), MARRIED TO A STRANGER (E.P.Dutton), THE HEART'S DESIRE (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, VEILS(City Lights). Her latest publication is a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (October 2006, Penguin).
Her individual short stories and essays have appeared in about fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, Shenandoah, Natural History Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, and is in press at an anthology, How I Learned to Cook and other writings On Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships, Penguin. She has written reviews for the New York Times and Newsday.
While a student she held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). The grants and awards she has received include, the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Currently she teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y and is an associate fellow at Yale.
Describe the room you write in.
It is a rectangular room with a desk, bed, chest, and Persian rug on the floor. It has very large windows on two sides, one overlooking the East River and the other, facing New York City skyline, including the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building. During the day because of a great deal of sun I have to pull down the shades but from midday on I can pull up the shades and enjoy the views.
When did you move to the United States from Iran? Why?
I came to the United States when I was seventeen years old to attend college. I was very restless as a young girl growing up in Iran, which was ve Conducted by Persis M. Karim Nahid Rachlin came to the United States more than three decades ago as a wide-eyed young woman seeking a college education. Like many early Iranian immigrants, she came at a time when US-Iranian relations were positive and when the United States actively supported Mohammad Reza Shah and his policies. Iran and Iranian culture were virtually unknown to most Americans and what little connection they made with that nation was with Persian cats and carpets. Rachlin, who married an American man and later became a citizen, had always dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1978, she published her first novel, Foreigner, to critical acclaim. Foreigner explored the contours of alienation/outsiderness, in both the context of being an Iranian immigrant and in her own country. Since the publication of her first novel, Rachlin has been productive as a writer and teacher, and is arguably one of the pioneers of what was early on referred to in some circles as “Iranian immigrant literature.” Despite the fact that she arrived in this country before the Iranian revolution of 1979, she has continuously explored the internal and external fallout of her own immigrant experiences and that of others who came after her. She has written novels and short stories, and most recently a memoir, Persian Girls, which Christopher Merrill, director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, named as “one of the four best books of the year” because of its revealing details about what it was like for Rachlin to grow up as a female in Iran. After writing a series of novels and short stories, Rachlin now joins a cadre of women writers who are defining the contours of an emerging body of Iranian diaspora writing. These writers include Tara Bahrampour, Gina Nahai, Azar Nafisi, Azadeh Moaveni and the France-based graphic memoirist, Marjane Satrapi—all of whom have written stories of their complex journeys between Iran and America as well as other nations. While Rachlin American novelist Nahid Rachlin (born 1950) is an Iranian-American novelist and short story writer. She has been called "perhaps the most published Iranian author in the United States". Nahid Rachlin was born June 6, 1950, in Abadan, Iran, the eighth of ten children (2 of whom had died before her birth) to Manoochehr and Mohtaram Bozorgmehri. Brought up by her mother's older from when she was not yet one until she was nine years old when her father who had been a circuit judge resigned and started a private practice. She then lived with her parents, who were emotionally distant, under the shadow of restrictive gender expectations. Her closest family relationship was with an older sister, Pari. Pari underwent arranged marriage to a physically abusive older man, and then lost access to her son after she sued for divorce. Pari remarried, but suffered episodes of mental breakdown for which she was institutionalised, and died young after a home accident. Rachlin emigrated to the United States when she was 17, gaining a BA at Lindenwood College. She married Howard Rachlin, a psychology professor, and in 1969 became a naturalized US citizen. They had a daughter named Leila. In the early 1970s she pursued graduate study in creative writing, writing short stories for a class with Richard Humphries at Columbia University, and for a class with Donald Barthelme at City College of New York. These stories won her the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. In 1976 Rachlin returned to Iran for the first time in twelve years, drawing on the experience for her debut novel Foreigner. .Quarterly
Nahid Rachlin
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