Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work been selected as a Notable Essay by Robert Atwan for the 2023 Best American Essays series. He is the winner, most recently, of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers & Praire Fire Creative Nonfiction Prize for “At Home in Avonlea,” a story exploring joy and hope in the wake of war.   
His personal essay, “The Enemy,” was nominated for the 2024 National Magazine Awards in Canada and received the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize from Malahat Review. The final judge, Daniel Allen Cox, said the following on Saadlou’s winning submission: “The Enemy,” a heart-wrenching story set in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, has a narrative tension that holds you from the start and never lets go, one that the writer’s relentless attention to detail makes all the more intense. Beneath the simplicity of the text, the big questions live—about belief, what human life is worth, and what connects us through tragedy—and they let us feel our own way to the piece’s powerful ending. 
Saadlou is also the winner of the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize for his entry titled “Dear God.” The final judge, Beth Ann Fennelly, said she chose the essay for its “tense and tender evocation of a time in the speaker’s life when he was coming to understand how the Iran-Iraq war would shape his family and identity forever.” 
Saadlou’s short stories and essays have appeared in The Margins, Southeast Review, and Asymptote, among other journals. His poems have appeared in Porter House Review, Ignatian, Thin Air Magazine, and Saint Katherine Review, and elsewhere. In addition, they have been anthologized in Odes to Our Undoing: Writers Reflecting on Crisis (Risk Press) and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press). Saadlou is also the winner of the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation, and his translation of Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou’s collection of selected poems, …And the Poet is a War Correspondent, recently received an honorable mention in the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for the Best Poetry in Translation.
As a translator, Saadlou has introduced the poetry of Rasool Yoonan and Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou to the English-speaking world, publishing numerous translations in Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, and Washington Square Review. Poet and translator Layla Benitez-James has praised Saadlou’s translations of Yoonan on Asymptote’s podcast for their “musicality” that bring the readers “directly into their center.”