Porochista Khakpour
“I have a longing for what is real, even though I know that authentic expression is a dicey operation.”
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“Khakpour [is] one of our best new satirists, partly because she is never as moving as when she is entirely sincere.”
“Brilliant…. What I love most about Porochista Khakpour’s writing is her voice: always direct, always passionate, always clear and brave, full of compassion and vulnerability, always open to the world. Brown Album is both a manifesto of survival and a lyric journey.”
“In this stirring collection of essays, Khakpour explores her life as a writer and her American experience as an Iranian immigrant, touching on the personal and the political with equal grace.”
“Confusing, exhilarating, terrifying, sad, scary, magical…. This book was balm to my Turkish-American soul, and to my cosmopolitan-writer-beyond-nationalism soul. Every page is overflowing with verve and insight and hilarity and brilliance and sadness and historical and cultural specificity. Porochista Khakpour is a treasure.”
“Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.”
“All of Khakpour’s strengths are on display here: punchy conversation, vivid detail, sharp humor. . .Khakpour brings her characters vividly to life; their flaws and feints at intimacy feel poignantly real, and their journeys generate real suspense. . .they are also imbued with a genuine humanity that wins our affection”
Porochista Khakpour is the author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Vintage Books, 2020), which Ploughshares called “fearless.” In 2o18 she published the memoir Sick (HarperCollins, 2018), which Kirkus Review praised as “lucid, eloquent, and unflinchingly honest.” Sick was named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by the Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Electric Literature,, Huffington Post, Bitch, The Milions, The Rumpus, Autostraddle and others. Khakpour was called one of Dazed’s “Top American Writers You need to be Reading,” and Open Road Media’s “10 Amazing Female Novelists Under 50.” Her next book is Teherangles, named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by TIME, The National, Nylon, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Library Journal. It will be published by Pantheon in June, 2024.
Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Press, 2008) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was named a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" by NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature and many more.
Discussing her view of being a writer in America, Khakpour notes, “I think to really be an artist, to really inhabit that, you have to accept on some level that you are not going to belong. Being an outsider, for instance, can be like being an observer.” As a child, she was acutely aware of her “resident alien” and Mulsim refugee status. “I remember trying to learn English on kindergarten playgrounds. I tried hard to be a convincing American but it was a losing battle. I was labeled weird and that tag never left me—all through high school, I was always the oddball. It was not always an easy path—I just had to tell myself that one day, being on the periphery would become an asset (and I think it finally has, as a creative adult).” She is also an advocate for those with chronic illness and disability, and speaks frequently on this topic.
Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others. Currently, she is Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review. She has presented at book festivals here and overseas, and served as a judge for various literary awards.
Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City.
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