About

Perla Kantarjian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer from Beirut and the author of You Must Become Field (Bad Betty Press, 2026). She writes poetry, fiction and essays in English, her third language after Armenian and Arabic.

She won the 2026 William Saroyan Short Story Prize for “Boys with Passports”. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, and highly commended in the Charles Causley Poetry Competition.

Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Wasafiri, Mizna, Magma, AMBIT and Black Warrior Review, among other publications.

She earned her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she held the 2021–22 Sonny Mehta Scholarship. She previously worked as a journalist and editor at Annahar.

Her poem “Half Woman, Half Starlight” is archived on the Moon as part of the Lunar Codex project.