Abdi Nazemian
Abdi Nazemian was born in Tehran in 1976 and grew up in Paris, Toronto, and New York, among other places. He studied English at Columbia University and Business Administration at the University of California Los Angeles. He is a screenwriter for films and TV series, a film producer, and an author of books for young people and adults.
Nazemian’s novels deal with themes such as family, queerness, and Persian culture. His debut »The Walk-In Closet« [2014] tells the story of a young woman who pretends to be in a relationship with her gay best friend in order to conform to the social expectations of the traditional Persian family image. »Like a Love Story« [2019] is set in New York in 1989, where three teenagers try to navigate the turbulence of friendship, love and sexuality in times of the AIDS crisis. The author’s most recent work and its first publication in German translation, »Only This Beautiful Moment« [2023], tells the story of a family in Iran and the USA across three generations. Seventeen-year-old, queer Moud travels with his father from Los Angeles to Tehran to visit his terminally ill grandfather. There he is confronted with unexpected secrets about his family that shake up everything he thought he knew about his origins and identity.
»Only This Beautiful Moment« was awarded the Lambda Literary Award in June 2024 as well as the Stonewall Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. »This engaging novel […] shows how queer communities find a way to thrive across times and places«, said the jury. Nazemian won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT debut novels in 2015 with »The Walk-In Closet«. »Like a Love Story« was a 2020 Stonewall Book Award Honor Book and was named one of the 100 best young adult books of all time by Time Magazine in 2021.
His new young adult novel, »Desert Echoes« [2024], will be published in September 2024.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
The Walk-In Closet
Curtis Brown Digital
New York, 2014
The Authentics
HarperCollins
New York, 2017
Like a Love Story
HarperCollins
New York, 2019
The Chandler Legacies
HarperCollins
New York, 2022
Only This Beautiful Moment
HarperCollins
New York, 2023
Translation:
Nur dieser eine Augenblick
Arctis
Hamburg, 2024
[Tr: Meritxell Janina Piel, Isabel Abedi]