An Ottawa-based writer, storyteller, and arts educator, Maria Saba was born and raised in Iran. Writing in both English and Farsi, she has published three books and over a hundred articles, interviews, and stories in four continents. Maria’s short story manuscript, “My First Friend,” was a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, and the title story, published in Scoundrel Time, won the Editor’s Choice Award and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her novella The Secret of Names was longlisted for the
2020 Disquiet Literary Prize. Maria has served on various arts and literature juries and is the recipient of grants in English literature from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the City of Ottawa. She attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Banff Writing Studio and residencies at Banff, the Al Purdy a-Frame in Ameliasburgh, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. She recently won the PEN Canada Scholarship and the Wallace Stegner Grant for the arts. Currently Maria is working on her novel There You Are.
