Shirin Valiat is a lot.
The Houston event planner is bold, opinionated, self-absorbed, and maybe not all that grateful for the niece who bails her out after an arrest for attempted prostitution in Aspen. But by the end of “The Persians,” the debut novel from Sanam Mahloudji, you too might be affectionately referring to her as “Auntie Shirin.”
Indeed, “Auntie Shirin” is the title of Mahloudji’s original short story, published in McSweeney’s Quarterly in 2018, that launched what would become a family saga extending from pre-Revolution Iran to ‘00s America. The novel has been shortlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
“In the most plain sense, it was one of the first time I had written Iranian characters,” says Mahloudji on a recent Zoom call. “I had been writing short stories for a number of years, and I was really moved to want to write about Iranians for the first time and to make their being from Iran part of the narrative.”
Born in Iran, raised in Los Angeles and now based in London, Mahloudji began writing short stories after her father’s passing in 2010. At the time, she was working as an attorney.
“I took this one-day class and I was sitting there shaking from being told by the instructor that I could write anything I wanted,” she says. “I think, maybe, contrasting that with what writing a legal memo felt like, it felt like this kind of universe opened for me.”
But her interest in writing Iranian characters is rooted in part with an experience early in the first Trump presidency when she volunteered to head to LAX to speak with Iranians who were not able to enter the U.S.
“I wasn’t practicing law at the time, but I went in support of people. I spoke with families and women landing from Tehran, some of them having to separate from family members, and feeling really terrified,” she recalls.
“I assumed that wouldn’t be something that I would be qualified to do, as somebody who grew up in L.A.,” Mahloudji recalls. “But I realized very soon that just my name even and my ability to communicate with them – my ability to hear their name and not have to ask them how to spell it, that I immediately understood them – that meant something.”
The experience shifted Mahloudji’s perspective about her writing.
“I always thought that I was, in a certain way, inauthentic as an Iranian, and if I were to write a novel, I could never handle writing a book about Iranians and in the way that I would want to,” she says. “In a way, having that experience and realizing how even after having spent most of my life in the States, people like me were being treated like we didn’t belong and were not allowed in the country. There was this feeling of OK, I’m Iranian and these little games that I play with myself to distance myself from my own culture, I needed to challenge that.”
What began as one short story turned into a series of them. Before she realized it, Mahloudji was writing a novel. “The Persians” is told from the perspective of five women, all part of a lineage that lent their family prestige and wealth in Iran before the 1979 Revolution.
Elizabeth, the matriarch who remains in Tehran, sees her fortune dwindle in the decades following the new regime. Seema, the eldest daughter, settles in Beverly Hills and dies shortly before younger sister Shirin’s misadventure in Aspen. Bita, Seema’s daughter, is a law student in New York, and Niaz, Shirin’s daughter, was raised by her grandmother in Tehran, where she has become a bit of a rabble-rouser while learning family history that remains unknown to the American branch.
The novel plays out like a soap opera – Will Elizabeth’s family learn her secret? Will Shirin beat the charges against her? – but it’s one that’s steeped in humor.
At the center of “The Persians,” though, is the 1979 Revolution.
“For a long time, one of the things that I would say about the book is that this isn’t a book about the revolution. I didn’t want to be writing a book about the revolution,” says Mahloudji. “But it’s sort of the elephant in the room for every Iranian on Earth. There’s before 1979 and after for every Iranian. It’s affected our entire sense of who we are, where we live, where our families are, where our futures might be. It’s the one thing that, in a way, brings us together.”
And though it’s primarily set in the ‘00s, “The Persians” is a story with themes that remain relevant today. Mahloudji, who expanded on this idea in a follow-up email, sees it about our commonality.
“Finding freedom is a theme in the book. In our desire to be free, maybe we have more in common with each other than we have differences,” she says.