Kimia Eslah is a feminist, queer writer who lives in Ontario. Eslah was born in Shiraz, Iran and lived with her parents and siblings in New Delhi, India before immigrating to Canada. Eslah is an instructional designer in addition to being a writer.
Fiction
The Daughter Who Walked Away
Halifax: Roseway Publishing, 2019.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Estranged from her abusive parents as a teenager, Taraneh Pourani overcame poverty, isolation and self-hatred to build a happy home with her loving husband and children. Triggered by her young sons’ annual visit with their grandparents, Taraneh becomes psychologically distressed. She begins to doubt her memories and question her decision to remain distanced from her aging parents.
A journey into Taraneh’s family history reveals three generations of unaddressed mental illness and unresolved childhood trauma. Due to poverty in early twentieth-century Iran, Taraneh’s grandmother, Batoul, is married at the age of nine and sent to live with her husband’s family. Ashamed and traumatized, Batoul raises her children to expect hardships and to endure them in secret. The seeds of dysfunction are planted in Mojegan, Taraneh’s mother. Mojegan is a nurse in Tehran in the 1960s when she marries the charming, but alcoholic and impulsive, Reza. She stands by Reza throughout their marriage, even after he abruptly kicks out their teenage daughter, Taraneh.
Fiction
Sister Seen, Sister Heard
Halifax: Roseway Publishing, 2022
forthcoming March 15, 2022
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Farah’s ready to move out of her parent’s house. It takes an hour to get to campus, and she has no freedom to be herself. Maiheen and Mostafa, first-generation Iranian immigrants in Toronto, find their younger daughter’s “Canadian” ways disappointing and embarrassing, and they wonder why Farah can’t be like her older sister Farzana — though Farah knows things about Farzana that her parents don’t. They begrudgingly agree to let Farah move, and she begins to explore her exciting new life as an independent university student. But when Farah gets assaulted on campus, everything changes. This beautiful coming-of-age story will be familiar to every immigrant in the diaspora who has struggled to find a way between cultures, every youth who has rebelled against their parents and every woman who has faced the world alone.