Join us to celebrate the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Fiction Winners! We'll welcome Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh (Winner: Short Story Collection for Zan), Alan Grostephan (Winner: Literary Novel for The Banana Wars), and Parul Kapur (Winner: First Novel for Inside the Mirror) for a reading and reception. Learn more about the other winners here.

This event is free and open to the public. It takes place in the Decatur Library Auditorium after the library has closed. Please enter through the Ground Floor, rear doors (from the lower level of the parking lot). Registration is requested, not required.

Virginia Highland Books will be our bookseller for the evening, and books will be available to purchase on site.

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About the Authors:

The daughter of an Iranian doctor and an American science teacher, Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh was born in Washington, D.C., came of age in Iran under the Shah, and later traveled back to the United States to attend university, receiving a degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1978. The Islamic Revolution began brewing during her senior year, and shortly after graduating, she returned to Iran and plopped herself down in the middle of it. In search of a happy medium between her two cultures, she later resided for many years in Spain. A career English teacher, Suzi has taught students in public schools, private schools, and universities on three continents and in three languages. Alongside her teaching career, she has maintained a second career as a writer, editor, and translator. Rather late in life, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she worked closely with National Book Award winners Sigrid Nunez and Ha Jin and Pen/Hemingway Award winner and New York Times Bestselling author Jennifer Haigh. She later traveled to Lesbos, Greece, on a global fellowship, where she worked as a volunteer interpreter at a refugee camp. Suzi’s fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, Fiction International, Glassworks Magazine, Narrative Northeast, Mobius Journal for Social Change, Quiddity International Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, titled Zan, was awarded the 2022 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize and was published by Dzanc Books in June of 2024.  Suzi’s cultural identity is a bit of a moving target, which makes it a paradox that she has resided, for the better part of the past two decades, on a mini-farm in Woodstock, Georgia, 25 miles north of Atlanta, where she has an organic garden and keeps a small menagerie of animals.

Alan Grostephan is the author of The Banana Wars, winner of the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award, and Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from UC Irvine and is a professor at Agnes Scott College. He lived for years in Colombia where he travels extensively and is currently writing about work, dispossession, and land restitution. He resides in Decatur, Georgia, and is married to the visual artist María Korol.

Parul Kapur is the author of Inside the Mirror, which won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the New American Voices Award. She was named 2025 Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel. Her writing has been supported with fellowships from Loghaven, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Hambidge Center. Parul has worked as a press officer at the United Nations in New York and a reporter in Mumbai, India. Her journalism and arts criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Newsday, Esquire, Art in America, Slate, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. Born in Assam, India, and raised in Connecticut, she lives in Atlanta.

About the Georgia Author of the Year Awards:

The Georgia Author of the Year Awards celebrates the best literature by Georgia writers. Georgia Writers Association assumed responsibility for the Georgia Author of the Year Awards (GAYA) shortly after its founding in 1994. The awards were first given in 1964 by the Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists. Published authors from Georgia are eligible for nomination. Awards in a variety of categories are announced and presented in June. Prominent winners of the GAYA include Malcolm Tariq for his poetry collection Heed the Hollow (2019); Ruby Lal, for her biography Empress (2018); Nic Stone for her novels Dear Justyce (2020) and Jackpot (2019); Natasha Trethewey for her memoir Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020); Judith Ortiz Cofer, for her essay collection Woman in Front of the Sun (2000); Kaitlin B. Curtice for her inspirational book Native: Identity Belonging, and Rediscovering God (2020); John Lewis for his graphic memoir March: Book Three (2016); poet Sharan Strange won a lifetime achievement award from the organization in 2018.