Join Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance for a virtual event on borders, exile, and migration with Alie Ataee and Atiq Rahimi. They will be in conversation with writer and scholar Amir Ahmadi Arian.

Aliyeh Ataei is an Iranian-Afghan author and screenwriter whose books have won major literary awards, including Mehregan-e-Adab for Best Novel. Ataei was born in 1981 and grew up in Darmian, a border region between South Khorasan Province of Iran and Farah Province of Afghanistan. Growing up in Iran as a female minority, she experienced a lot of discrimination and difficulties which led her to work as a women`s rights activist. Her works are deeply influenced by her observations and experiences as a child. She graduated from High school in Birjand and went to Tehran to continue her studies in Tehran University of Art where she received her B.A. and M.A. in screenplay writing. Ataei dedicated most of her focus to writing about immigration. In addition to publishing books, she has been working with several magazines such as Hamshahri, Tajrobeh, and Nadastan. Her short stories have also been translated and published in several American and French magazines such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Guernica. Ataei`s collection of personal essays, entitled Kursokhi in Persian, is currently being translated into French and is set to be published by Gallimard publishing House in 2023.

Atiq Rahimi is a French-Afghanistani writer and filmmaker. In 1984, Rahimi’s family went into exile, and after studying at the Franco-Afghanistani lycée, he joined his father in Bombay. In 1979, he returned to Afghanistan to read literature at the University of Kabul, and worked as a cinema critic. In 1984, he relocated to Pakistan for a brief period, before seeking political asylum in France. He completed his PhD in audio-visual communications at the Sorbonne, and began writing Earth and Ashes in 1996. After 18 years in exile, Atiq Rahimi returned to Afghanistan in February 2002 and helped establish an Afghanistani writers’ centre in Kabul, with the assistance of the French government. Rahimi is the recipient of a number of prestigious literary and film awards. In 2004, he won the Prix du Regard vers l’Avenir at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Dhow award for Best Feature Film at the Zanzibar International Film Festival for his film version of Earth and Ashes. In 2008, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for The Patience Stone – France’s highest literary honour. Rahimi directed 2012 the film adaptation of The Patience Stone from a screenplay he co-authored with Jean-Claude Carrière.

Moderator Amir Ahmadi Arian has published short stories and essays in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. His first novel in English, Then The Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperCollins in 2020. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Queensland in Australia, and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.​ He teaches literature and creative writing at City College, New York.

The conversation will take place in Farsi with English interpretation provided by Nasim Fekrat, an award-winning blogger, journalist, and photographer from Afghanistan.