Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi has been named the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her second novel, Call Me Zebra. It's the story of a young Iranian woman retracing the steps her father took with her decades earlier when they fled during the Iran-Iraq War, via Kurdistan and Catalonia (Barcelona). She comes from a family of "autodidacts, anarchists, and atheists" obsessed with literature. It's a droll intellectual exploration of family, war, and the power of literature to change people.