Salar Abdoh is a novelist and essayist. He is the author of the novelsThe Poet Game (2000),Opium (2004),Tehran At Twilight (2014),Out of Mesopotamia (2020),A Nearby Country Called Love (2023), and the editor and translator of the anthologyTehran Noir (2014). He is also a director of the program in Creative Writing at theCity College of New York at theCity University of New York.
Salar Abdoh was born inTehran, Iran and also spent some time in England. When Abdoh was fourteen his family was forced to leave Iran for the US. Abdoh earned an undergraduate degree fromU.C. Berkeley and received a Master's from theCity College of New York.[citation needed]
Abdoh's first novel,The Poet Game, focuses on a young agent sent by a top-secret Iranian government agency to infiltrate a group of Islamic extremists in New York in order to keep them from acts of terror that might draw the US into a war in the Middle East.[1] Though the book was published in 2000, it received far greater attention following theSeptember 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.[2] His second novel,Opium (2004) tells the story of a young American who used to work as a drug-runner along the Afghan/Iran border during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Years later, living in New York and trying to keep a low profile, his past suddenly catches up with him as the US is gearing up to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Abdoh's third novel,Tehran At Twilight, a literary thriller reminiscent of Graham Greene'sThe Quiet American, depicts the limits of friendship, and betrayal, in a time of war and after. Simultaneously with this novel, in 2014 Abdoh also edited and translatedTehran Noir, a collection of noir stories from various Iranian writers about Tehran. By 2020, with the Publication ofOut of Mesopotamia, a war novel based on his own experiences in the wars of the Middle East (Iraq & Syria), Abdoh told the story of a journalist who, as theNew York Times book review noted, "Torn between war and art ... chooses both."[3] The novel was selected as a best book of 2020 byPublishers Weekly.[4]
In his latest work,A Nearby Country Called Love, called by theNew York Times “a complex portrait of interpersonal relationships” and “brutally poignant” by theWashington Post, Abdoh does a U turn from war to explore issues of sexuality, gender, queerness, oppression and masculinity in the modern age and especially in the Middle East.[5][6]
Abdoh also co-wrote the playQuotations from a Ruined City with his older brother, the late world-famous avant-garde theater director,Reza Abdoh.[7]
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