German · b. 1988
Shida Bazyar is a German novelist born in 1988 in Hermeskeil, in the Hunsrück region, to Iranian parents who had come to Germany as political refugees. She grew up there and later studied literary writing at the University of Hildesheim. Her debut novel, Nachts ist es leise in Teheran (2016), follows an Iranian family across four generations and several decades, from the revolution of 1979 to the present. It won the Ulla Hahn Prize and the Uwe Johnson Prize for first novels. Her later books include Drei Kameradinnen (2021), a story of three friends in Germany. Her novel Die Lücken, set in a fictional village modelled on her home town, won the 2026 German Book Prize and the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize. Bazyar also writes for the stage and teaches creative writing. Her work places the experience of migrant families and the history of German racism at the centre of contemporary German fiction.