Fiction
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr!—a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—and two books of poetry: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. Akbar received his bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and his MFA from Butler University in Indianapolis.
2026 Fiction Winner: Martyr!
Martyr! is the story of a Cyrus, a young recovering addict and poet, searching for meaning in art, family, and death.
2022 Poetry Shortlist: Pilgrim Bell
With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance―the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation―teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness. Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives―resonant, revelatory, and holy.
