Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in the greater Los Angeles area. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, Ucross, VCCA, Civitella Ranieri, Sewanee Writers Conference, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, and more.
Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Chicago Tribune Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in First Fiction. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, an NPR Best Book of 2014, an Electric Literature Best Book of 2014, and more. Her memoir SICK (Harper Perennial, 2018) was a Best Book of 2018 according to TIME, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, and others.
In 2020, the Vintage imprint of Knopf Doubleday published her collection of essays, Brown Album, to all starred pre-pub reviews and much acclaim. Their Pantheon imprint published her third novel Tehrangeles in June 2024. The novel was an Indie Next Pick, an NPR Book of the Day, one of TIME's 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2024, and was named one of the best books of 2024 by Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W, and Vanity Fair.
At MacDowell, Khakpour worked on the first of a three-part novel called Fatimas, plus a proposal and outline for her agent. She also worked on an experimental memoir called Nightliving and wrote a long essay about queer coming-of-age for an anthology on failure. While in residence, Khakpour learned that her novel Tehrangeles made it on the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Award longlist.
Portrait by Bing Guan
