Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has been noted in the 2023 Best American Essays series by Robert Atwan. His personal essay, “The Enemy,” has received the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize. The final judge, Daniel Allen Cox, said the following on Saadlou’s winning submission: “The Enemy,” a heart-wrenching story set in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, has a narrative tension that holds you from the start and never lets go, one that the writer’s relentless attention to detail makes all the more intense. Beneath the simplicity of the text, the big questions live—about belief, what human life is worth, and what connects us through tragedy—and they let us feel our own way to the piece’s powerful ending.
Saadlou’s short stories and essays have appeared in Margins, Plenitude Magazine, Southeast Review, and Asymptote, among other journals. His poems have appeared in Porter House Review, Ignatian, Thin Air Magazine, and Saint Katherine Review, and elsewhere. In addition, they have been anthologized in Odes to Our Undoing: Writers Reflecting on Crisis (Risk Press) and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press). Saadlou is also the winner of the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation, and his translation of Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou’s collection of selected poems, …And the Poet is a War Correspondent, recently received an honorable mention in the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for the Best Poetry in Translation.
Saadlou grew up in Iran and started learning English in his late teens. Since then, he has worked as a journalist, editor, translator, and college professor. He originally studied journalism at City University London while working as a sports writer. He later majored in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California where—as the recipient of several scholarships and a teaching fellowship—he taught English Composition and earned his MFA. As a translator, Saadlou has introduced the poetry of Rasool Yoonan and Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou to the English-speaking world, publishing numerous translations in Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, and Washington Square Review. Poet and translator Layla Benitez-James has praised Saadlou’s translations of Yoonan on Asymptote’s podcast for their “musicality” that bring the readers “directly into their center.”
In January 2017, while visiting family and friends during winter break, Saadlou learned that he was among the many Iranian nationals barred from re-entering the United States despite having a valid student visa due to President Trump’s travel ban. Speaking on the ban in an interview with AWP, Saadlou emphasized the importance of giving one another “the opportunity to present ourselves.” He eventually made it back to the US on February 10, and finished his MFA degree in May. Two months later, in the wake of Linkin Park’s lead singer Chester Bennington taking his own life, Saadlou published a piece about depression and suicide with NPR’s WGBH Boston. Inspiring Iranians, an NGO social media group highlighting the achievements of Iranian immigrants in the US, hailed Saadlou’s article as “thought-provoking” and called it helpful to “a reader who is contemplating suicide.”