Lila Azam Zanganeh

Lila Azam Zanganeh is a writer raised in Paris, France, by exiled Kurdish Iranian parents.

She lives and works in New York City.

Azam Zanganeh (from Kurdistani Zangeneh tribe) was born to Kurdistani Iranian exile parents, and the family escaped to Paris when Zanganeh was two years old, following the revolution of 1979.

After studying literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to become a teaching fellow in literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University.

In 2002, she began contributing literary articles, interviews, and essays to a host of American and European publications, among which The New York Times, The Paris Review, Le Monde, and la Repubblica.

She also holds a master's degree in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, has been published by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States, Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, Éditions de l'Olivier in France, Contact in Holland, L'Ancora del Mediterraneo in Italy, Duomo Ediciones in Spain, Azbooka in Russia, Büchergilde Gutenberg in Germany, Everest in Turkey, Shang Shu in China, Al-Kamel in Lebanon, Mehri Publications in Iran, and Alfaguara Objetiva in Brazil, where it reached No. 10 on the national Brazilian bestseller list.

She is fluent in eight languages (English, French, Kurdish, Persian, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese).

She writes and lives in New York City.

Her new novel, Exit Paradise, is forthcoming in 2025.

She is the author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (Penguin Books, 2011).

She was a member of the jury for the 2017 Man Booker Prize for fiction.

In 2021, she published a long-form essay in Lolita in the Afterlife (Vintage Books, 2021).

Her forthcoming novel, Exit Paradise, will be published in 2025.