For the past 17 years, the campus of the University of Arizona has been taken over by the Tucson Festival of Books. Authors from across the nation attend to present their new works. This year, that included Adib Khorram, author of “Darius the Great is Not Okay.”
“I think around 2010 or 2011 a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to try National Novel Writing Month, NNWM. And I was like, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’” Khorram said while signing books ahead of his presentation “I failed miserably.”
But Khorram kept at it, realizing that while writing a novel in a month may be a tall order, surely he could write one with more time.
“So I wrote a bunch more really bad novels, and eventually I wrote one that was less bad,” he said.
Eventually that practice got him interested in actually seeing one of these books in print.
“And then I wrote the novel that became ‘Darius the Great Is Not Okay.’” he said.
That title is just one of Khorram’s many books that feature queer characters. While many authors will say they write the books they wanted to have growing up, Khorram takes a different approach.
”I think I’m a very selfish writer, and I write for myself,” he said. “And so I, being queer, I’m writing for my queer self.”
Mostly writing for a teen YA audience, Khorram has also dabbled in adult fiction. During the pandemic, he read a lot of romance novels and said he felt it would be fun to try his hand at writing one.
”I thought, you know, I had something unique to say about love as a queer millennial, as a queer Iranian American, that I haven’t found a lot of in romance yet,” he said.
He said he also noticed that queer sex in the novels he was reading wasn’t ringing very true to him.
“Sometimes they, like, just didn’t use lube, or talk about condoms and STIs,” he said. “And I get that’s not for everyone, but I actually think, like, consent is sexy, and communicating with your partner is sexy and, like, having a good time is sexy. And so I wanted to write about that.”
Food is another story element that pops up often for Khorram, who considers himself part of the Iranian diaspora.
”Food was one of the most accessible parts of my own culture to me, and so it was a part that was easy to share with people,” he said. “If you find that you are good at something, it never hurts to lean into it.”
Like many of the authors at the festival, Khorram was also teasing his newest book, “One Word Six Letters,” which came out on March 17.
