Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
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Find Martyr! A Novel Kaveh Akbar in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
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The intersection of addiction recovery, devotional poetry, and Iranian-American identity forms the core of Kaveh Akbar's acclaimed body of writing. Akbar initially earned recognition as a poet exploring faith and sobriety before publishing his bestselling debut prose work, Martyr! A Novel.
His writing bridges intimate personal struggles with philosophical and political questions, earning honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and selection as a National Book Award finalist.
Born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989, Akbar moved to the United States at two years old. He pursued higher education in creative writing, earning a Master of Fine Arts from Butler University and a PhD from Florida State University. Akbar later joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, serving as director of the undergraduate creative writing program. Beyond university teaching, he founded the literary interview platform Divedapper and served as Poetry Editor for The Nation.
Akbar's early publications established his standing in contemporary poetry, beginning with his 2017 chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic and his debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published the same year. He followed these with Pilgrim Bell in 2021. In addition to his own writing, Akbar edited The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine and co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism & Addiction with Paige Lewis. His honors include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, multiple Pushcart Prizes, the Levis Reading Prize, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and inclusion on the 2024 TIME100 Next list.
Across poetry and prose, Akbar's work frequently engages with themes of addiction, sobriety, heritage, and spiritual longing. Drawing on his Iranian background and his experience learning English as a second language, he incorporates Farsi language elements and stylistic defamiliarization into his writing. His work balances emotional vulnerability with humor, confronting past trauma while seeking divine and human connection.
1 books in catalog
The intersection of addiction recovery, devotional poetry, and Iranian-American identity forms the core of Kaveh Akbar's acclaimed body of writing. Akbar initially earned recognition as a poet exploring faith and sobriety before publishing his bestselling debut prose work, Martyr! A Novel.
His writing bridges intimate personal struggles with philosophical and political questions, earning honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and selection as a National Book Award finalist.
Born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989, Akbar moved to the United States at two years old. He pursued higher education in creative writing, earning a Master of Fine Arts from Butler University and a PhD from Florida State University. Akbar later joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, serving as director of the undergraduate creative writing program. Beyond university teaching, he founded the literary interview platform Divedapper and served as Poetry Editor for The Nation.
Akbar's early publications established his standing in contemporary poetry, beginning with his 2017 chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic and his debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published the same year. He followed these with Pilgrim Bell in 2021. In addition to his own writing, Akbar edited The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine and co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism & Addiction with Paige Lewis. His honors include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, multiple Pushcart Prizes, the Levis Reading Prize, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and inclusion on the 2024 TIME100 Next list.
Across poetry and prose, Akbar's work frequently engages with themes of addiction, sobriety, heritage, and spiritual longing. Drawing on his Iranian background and his experience learning English as a second language, he incorporates Farsi language elements and stylistic defamiliarization into his writing. His work balances emotional vulnerability with humor, confronting past trauma while seeking divine and human connection.
