Purdue and Butler alum Kaveh Akbar shifts smoothly from poet to novelist

Kaveh Akbar will talk about his novel “Martyr!” during a Jan. 28 event at Indiana Landmarks, 1201 Central Ave. (Beowulf Sheehan photo)

Before the publication of his debut novel “Martyr!” in 2024, Purdue University and Butler University alum Kaveh Akbar was known as an accomplished poet and a leading promoter of poetry as an art form.

The “Martyr!” story, based on a twentysomething Iranian-American poet living in Indiana, made Akbar a rising star of narrative fiction. The book was one of five finalists for the National Book Award in the category of fiction, and the staff of The New York Times Book Review selected “Martyr!” as one of the 10 best books of the year.

Cyrus Shams is the novel’s protagonist who looks to martyrs of the past, such as Irish Republican Army figure Bobby Sands and French military icon Joan of Arc, for examples of meaningful lives and meaningful deaths.

Akbar, who will talk about “Martyr!” during a Jan. 28 author event at Indiana Landmarks, 1201 Central Ave., said narrative storytelling allowed him to write about Cyrus and people in his life who don’t share his opinions about perishing for a cause.

“I like very much the way a novel allows you to ventriloquize opposing viewpoints,” Akbar said during an interview from Iowa City, Iowa, where he teaches English and creative writing at the University of Iowa. “If I hold conflicting ideas about something like sobriety, for instance, or God, I can put one view in the mouth of one character and one view in the mouth of another character and have them argue about it or duke it out. I’m very interested in narrative’s capacity for that.”

Akbar was a toddler when he moved with his family from Tehran, Iran, to the United States. The Cyrus character also was young when he moved from Iran to the United States—but he was accompanied only by his father. Cyrus’ mother was a passenger on Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down in 1988 by two surface-to-air missiles fired by a U.S. Navy ship.

The reverberations of that true-life event, which the United States explained as the misidentification of a plane thought to be an attacking military fighter, heavily influence Akbar’s novel.

“So much of ‘Martyr!’ is orbiting this event that happened in 1988,” Akbar said. “It’s a real historical event in which 290 people were killed, including 66 children. When I hear a number like 290, it feels large. My brain recognizes it as more than two and less than 5,000. But if it were 289 or 294, it wouldn’t feel somatically different to my brain. And yet that difference is a human being whose interiority is as vital and complex as my own. If it was me or if it was someone I knew personally and loved, that difference would feel obliteratingly massive.”

Cyrus grows up in Fort Wayne before attending Keady University. (If Purdue University basketball coach Gene Keady factored in naming that fictional school, Akbar doesn’t fully spill the beans. “I can neither confirm nor deny the association, other than to say I did my undergraduate at Purdue University and then taught at Purdue University for five years,” he said. “I have strong ties to that particular institution.”)

On a quest to write a book of poetry about martyrs, Cyrus discovers that a visual artist from Iran, known as Orkideh, is staging a conceptual art piece in the tradition of Marina Abramović at a New York City art gallery. Orkideh’s piece is titled “Death-Speak.” Diagnosed with cancer, she’s spending her final days chatting with anyone who shows up at the gallery.

Cyrus heads to the East Coast to learn what he can from someone on course for a “meaningful death.”

“The book began with the idea that I would just write 20 vignettes of people sitting and talking to her,” said Akbar, the founder of poetry-themed website divedapper.com who organized Divedapper poetry festivals on Butler’s campus in 2016, 2018 and 2019. “I quickly realized that that was a good vehicle for me to perform certain feats of semantic agility and to opine lyrically, but it was not particularly narratively compelling. There was no momentum in the book.

“In order for the book to be interesting as a narrative, propulsively, the person sitting across from Orkideh had to be as interesting as she was. And thus Cyrus was born. Now I think most people would say Cyrus is the main character of the book. So it’s an interesting situation to be in, where the main character of your book is sort of just the solution to a narrative problem.”

Akbar’s Jan. 28 author event, presented by Tomorrow Bookstore in partnership with Indiana Humanities and Butler’s MFA in Creative Writing, will promote the paperback edition of “Martyr!” published on Dec. 31. For more information, visit eventbrite.com.