Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator. His memoir excerpt, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected by Robert Atwan as a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays series.
His short story, “Think of the Sea,” was recently a runner-up in the 2025 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. He has won the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize for “At Home in Avonlea” (selected by Jenny Heijun Wills) and the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize for “Dear God,” praised by judge Beth Ann Fennelly for its “tense and tender evocation” of life in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War.
Saadlou’s essay “The Enemy” received the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 National Magazine Awards in Canada. Final judge Daniel Allen Cox called it “a heart-wrenching story set in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, with a narrative tension that holds you from the start and never lets go.”
He has received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a writing fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Bellingham Review, American Literary Review, The Margins, and Southeast Review, among other journals. His poems have been anthologized in Woman, Life, Freedom (Guernica Editions), Odes to Our Undoing (Risk Press), and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press).
As a translator, Saadlou has won the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation, and he has also earned honorable mention for the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for Best Poetry in Translation. 

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