STARFest presents Nazanine Hozar

Nazanine Hozar was born in Tehran during the chaotic days leading up to the revolution that would depose the Shah of Iran and bring to power the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The year after her birth, Iraq invaded Iran, sparking a war. It is this tumultuous time that provides the background to Aria, Hozar’s first novel.

Hozar came to Canada with her mother when she was seven, settling in Surrey, BC. Aria began life as a screenplay during her time as a creative writing student at the University of British Columbia, but eventually morphed into a novel. Significant portions of Aria were composed on the bus to and from the university. Hozar’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Vancouver Observer and Prairie Fire magazine.

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of four books including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, which won the 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, winner of the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. Di Cintio's book about the secret lives of taxi drivers will appear in Spring 2021.

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