Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a writer whose work excavates the messy, intimate terrain of identity across borders and languages. Her fiction grapples with displacement, belonging, and the ways literature itself becomes a refuge—themes that feel both deeply personal and urgently contemporary. Oloomi’s prose is dense with literary reference and philosophical inquiry, creating novels that demand close reading but reward it with genuine emotional resonance. Her narrative style is distinctly her own, blending experimental techniques with a novelist’s ear for authentic human vulnerability.
Her acclaimed novel Call Me Zebra earned the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a recognition that speaks to the book’s distinctive voice and literary ambition. The novel traces the life of a peripatetic woman shaped by a childhood spent in Iranian libraries and refugee camps, following her as she moves through the world seeking connection through books and memory. Call Me Zebra exemplifies Oloomi’s gift for transforming experiences of cultural displacement into layered narratives that interrogate the very act of storytelling itself. Her recognition at this prestigious level marks her as a significant voice in contemporary American fiction—a writer unafraid to challenge readers while never losing sight of the human stories at the center of her work.
