Sahar Delijani is the author of CHILDREN OF THE JACARANDA TREE, an internationally acclaimed novel, translated into thirty-two languages and published in more than seventy-five countries. Delijani’s writing has appeared in Literary Hub, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Kenyon Review, Kweli Journal and The Bellevue Review. She is the recipient of a de Groot Foundation Courage to Write Grant, a Society of Authors and Author’s Foundation Grant, and of fellowships at Art Omi: Writers, Hedgebrook and Monson Arts. Her work has furthermore been longlisted for a Granum Foundation Prize, France’s Prix des Lecteurs Sélection by Le Livre de Poche and nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best American Essay Series. Born in Iran in 1983, Delijani grew up in California and lived for many years in Turin, Italy. She currently lives in New York City.
Residency Project: Following a-story-within-a-story structure combined with interview scripts, FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL is set between the violent aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Woman Life Freedom uprising in Iran in 2022. A work of autobiographical literary fiction, the novel is inspired by Delijani’s parents’ incarceration as political dissidents in 1983 in Iran, their subsequent release a few years later, and their struggle to build back a life shattered into pieces.
FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL tells the story of Neda, a writer living in New York City, who is on a quest to find out about her past, her parents’ incarceration in the horror houses of the Islamic Republic’s jails, and her own birth in the notorious Evin Prison. In order to understand, Neda conducts a series of interviews with her parents, asking them about their memories, the hardships and challenges of rebuilding their lives post-incarceration, and the meaning of it all if there is any.
Reflecting on literature, generational trauma and the continuation of human resilience, FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL examines the connection between political persecution and social alienation, the pernicious way silence works its way into the lives of survivors, and how breaking it can be concomitantly a catharsis and an existential crisis for those who live to tell the tale.