Kaveh Akbar has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes for his poetry, and his collection Pilgrim Bell (2022) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. His work has been featured in The New Yorker and the Paris Review, on BBC Radio 4's Start The Week and Front Row, on the New Yorker's Radio Hour, and in The Kindergarten Teacher starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. Born in Tehran, he lives in Iowa.
I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life. -- John Green, author of <i>The Fault in Our Stars</i></b> Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. -- Lauren Groff, author of <i>The Matrix</i> An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come . . . This book does everything. -- Tommy Orange, author of <i>There, There</i> I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel like this. Martyr! is simply extraordinary. Kaveh Akbar has written a novel that will stay with me forever. -- Clint Smith, author of <i>How the Word Is Passed</i> Martyr! will stay in my soul for good—a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight—its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA -- Leslie Jamison, author of <i>The Empathy Exams</i> Akbar is a black-belt storyteller, and MARTYR! is a page-turner I couldn’t put down. Buy this book! -- Mary Karr, author of <i>The Liar's Club</i></b>