Kaveh
Delshad.
Novelist and critic. Author of The Long Room. Contributing writer at Harper's. Currently reading four hundred and seventeen books.
On Reading Four Hundred and Seventeen Books.
Kaveh Delshadwas born in Isfahan in 1974 and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1980. He was educated at Brown, where he read English and Persian; at Oxford, where he wrote a doctorate on the reception of Sadegh Hedayat in mid-century America; and at the desks of two small bookshops, one in Providence and one in Muswell Hill, where he worked for a combined six years.
His first novel, The Long Room, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2022 to critical reception it has since taken him three years to metabolize. It is a novel about a translator and his father. It was longlisted for the 2022 American Book Award in fiction, and he has, as he says himself, never quite gotten over the reading week during which he found out.
The reason I said yes to the chair — the only reason — is that I have never once, in my life as a writer, understood a book better than in the week I found out other people had also read it. I wanted a year of that.
He has served on one previous panel — the translation panel of 2019, when he was thirty-nine, and, in his words, "the youngest person in the room by fifteen years and the person who had read the fewest books." He has spent the intervening seven years, he says, "reading in preparation for a call that turned out to come."
What the panel is asked to do.
Delshad's panel of five will read four hundred and seventeen books between January 8 and October 6. That is roughly ninety books per juror; roughly two books per juror per week; roughly one hour of every waking hour, for ten months, spent inside somebody else's sentences.
They will meet in person four times: at the seating, in January, at the New York Public Library's Rose Reading Room; in April, at a private lunch at the Century Association; in September, at the foundation's Brooklyn offices, to compose the longlist; and, finally, on the evening of November 8, sequestered without staff at Cooper Union, to write the citation and choose the laureate.
I have been told, by four previous chairs, that the writing of the citation is the hardest thing they will ever have done. I have been told this by four of the best writers I know. I am prepared to believe them.
What Delshad is reading, when he is not reading for the prize.
Every juror is asked, in a small tradition begun in 1994, to publish a "reading beside the reading" — a short list of books they have kept beside them during the season, and returned to when the submissions become, in their words, "too much of the same country."
Delshad's list is to the right. It is, he notes, "the least representative list of what I love that I have ever been asked to write. But it is what the season has asked me to keep close."
On what he hopes to find.
"I would like to be surprised. I would like to be surprised by a book from a house I have not heard of, or a book by a writer I have been reading for twenty years, or a book that arrives in the third week of March and takes me the whole of April to understand. I would like to find, and I say this cautiously, a book I have to work for.The panel will read four hundred and seventeen books. I hope five of them will make me want to read them again in January."
Delshad's interview with the Reading Roomwill be published in Vol. XLVI, No. 6, on the first Tuesday of February 2026.