After the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, her family fled Iran as refugees, transiting through Turkey, France, and Switzerland before eventually resettling in the Greater Los Angeles area. Khakpour has described herself as an “infant of the Islamic Revolution and toddler of the Iran-Iraq War”. Khakpour’s maternal great-uncle, Akbar Etemad, was the AEOI’s founding president and is regarded as “the father of Iran’s nuclear programme.” Her younger, U.S.-born brother, Arta Khakpour, is a high school teacher.

Khakpour’s paternal grandmother was from the village of Garakan, while her mother’s family is from Hamadan. Manijeh is an accountant, while Asha is a theoretical nuclear physicist who attended MIT on a full scholarship. Her parents, Manijeh and Asha Khakpour, met while working together at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). Her first name, Porochista, is of ancient Zoroastrian origin and derives from “Pourucista”, one of Zarathustra’s daughters. Khakpour was born on Januin Tehran, Iran. Her nonfiction essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Paris Review Daily, Slate, Elle, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of four books, including her 2007 debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Porochista Khakpour (Farsi: پوروچیستا خاکپور, born January 17, 1978) is an Iranian American novelist, essayist, and journalist.Ī refugee from Iran whose family fled the Iran-Iraq War and the Islamic Revolution, Khakpour grew up in the Greater Los Angeles area before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College.

Khakpour at the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival

Porochista khakpour sick a memoir