IN PERSON - Dalia Azim - COUNTRY OF ORIGIN and Sindya Bhanoo - SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIN seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed government—but she ultimately decides to flee to America with a young soldier she hardly knows, an impulsive act that has far-reaching consequences on both sides of the ocean. A powerful and universal debut novel about family, identity, and independence, Country of Origin is as much about a nation’s coming-of-age as it is about secrets and lies, love and truth.
SEEKING FORTUNE ELESEWHERE travels from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart.
In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In No. 16 Model House Road, a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In Nature Exchange, a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In A Life in America, a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students.
Dalia Azim’s work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train (where she received their Short Story Award for New Writers), Other Voices, Alcalde, and Sightlines, among other places. She lives in Austin, TX, where she is the manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art. Previously she worked as a researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. She graduated with a dual degree in art and literature from Stanford University and grew up in Canada and Colorado.
Sindya Bhanoo’s fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, the Disquiet Literary Prize and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences. A longtime newspaper reporter, she has worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Austin, TX.