Négar Djavadi was born in Iran in 1969 to a family of intellectuals opposed to the regimes both of the Shah, then of Khomeini. She arrived in France at the age of eleven, having crossed the mountains of Kurdistan on horseback with her mother and sister. She is a screenwriter and lives in Paris. Disoriental is her first novel.
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Négar Djavadi
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Europa Editions congratulates authors Domenico Starnone and Négar Djavadi, and translators Jhumpa Lahiri and Tina Kover!
Négar Djavadi and Domenico Starnone make the shortlist for National Book Awards in Translated Literature
Négar Djavadi's Disoriental has been Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019.
Négar Djavadi's Disoriental has been shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Latest reviews
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Although Irish authors have won in the past, the International Dublin Literary Award doesn't simply pay lip service to the international dimension of the prize, and this year readers will be brought on a journey around the world, to countries including Canada, France, India,...— RTE, Sep 5 2020![]()
Disoriental, by Iranian author Négar Djavadi and translated by Tina Kover, is an award-winning multigenerational novel that winds together the history of Iran with questions of identity and belonging as the protagonist builds a life in modern Paris. Djavadi skilfully tells the...— The Guardian, May 22 2019![]()
(...) It has also proved to me how ridiculous the phrase “women’s writing” is. The books I’ve read have been wildly, delightfully different in both style and substance, zigzagging from a surreal Chinese short-story collection to a Mexican gothic novella to an epic Polish...— The Guardian, Sep 28 2018![]()
In this sophisticated debut, a French-Iranian woman tells of her home country’s violent history and her family’s escape to Paris— The Guardian, Jul 25 2018![]()
The French-Iranian filmmaker Négar Djavadi’s first novel, Disoriental, translated by Tina Kover, is narrated by Kimiâ Sadr, who flees Iran aged ten with her mother and sisters in the middle of one night in 1981. As the author herself once did, they spend five nights crossing...— The Times Literary Suplement, Jul 20 2018![]()
With a blurb promising a story of growing up in exile and even the title cleverly playing on words ‘disoriented’ and a sense of ‘disassociating’ oneself from ‘oriental’, this was always going to be a book that appealed to me. However, even if you are not as fascinated...— Shiny New Books, Jul 18 2018![]()
As Kimia sits in a hospital waiting room, anticipating her IVF results, she reflects on the history of her family, from her great grandfather with his 52 wives to her parents, Darius and Sara, who fought back against each corrupt regime of their time in Iran. Tales of her extended...— The Independent, Jul 3 2018![]()
“The truth of memory is strange, isn’t it? Our memories select, eliminate, exaggerate, minimize, glorify, denigrate. They create their own versions of events and serve up their own reality. Disparate but cohesive. Imperfect yet sincere.” Thus begins a compulsive, fiercely...— Bookanista, May 25 2018![]()
“The novel pulsates with life but does not shirk from violence….. The gorgeous prose…takes the edge off the relentless turmoil described throughout.”— The Financial Times, May 18 2018![]()
Négar Djavadi’s debut novel Disoriental (Désorientale, 2016) is a wide-ranging story of an Iranian family that finds refuge in France, after being persecuted under the Shah and Khomeini regimes in Iran. At the core of the novel is Kimiâ Sadr, who sits at a fertility clinic...— Helsinki Book Review, May 17 2018![]()
A woman reflects on the generation that have come before her - beginning with her Persian great grandfather in 1896 via her family’s harrowing escape to France during the Iranian revolution - all from the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic. Written with love, joy and...— Stylist, Apr 3 2018![]()
Djavadi’s momentous first novel is a both a multigenerational family saga and a history of modern Iran. Narrated by 25-year-old Kimia Sadr, the story opens in 1996 in a fertility clinic in Paris, but Kimia’s Iranian ancestors’ stories take over right there in the waiting...— Publishers Weekly, Feb 26 2018![]()
Djavadi knows her material cold and every scene rings true— Kirkus review, Feb 15 2018![]()
I was lucky enough to get an early proof of this (thanks, Daniela!) and I loved it. The story takes place in a Parisian fertility clinic where Kimia is waiting to find out if she is pregnant. During her wait, she thinks back to how she got there, tracing back her ancestors and...— Turnaround Blog, Jan 17 2018![]()
Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at age 10 with her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now 25 and waiting in a Parisian fertility clinic, Kimiâ—storyteller extraordinaire—is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable...— Publishers Weekly, Dec 10 2017
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