"Simin Daneshvar: Early Iranian at Stanford"; a Documentary by Sharif University of Technology Association (Farsi)

Simin Daneshvar

Simin Dāneshvar (Persian: سیمین دانشور‎;‎ April 28, 1921 – March 8, 2012) was an Iranian academic, novelist, fiction writer and translator. Daneshvar had a number of firsts to her credit. In 1948, her collection of Persian short stories was the first by an Iranian woman to be published. The first novel by an Iranian woman was her Savushun ("Mourners of Siyâvash," 1969), which has become Iran's bestselling novel ever. Daneshvar's Playhouse, a collection of five stories and two autobiographical pieces, is the first volume of translated stories by an Iranian woman author. (From Wikipedia)

"Talking With A Shadow" by Khosrow Sinai (2005)

Talking With A Shadow is a movie about the renowned Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat.



Sadegh Hedayat



Sadegh (also spelled as Sadeq) Hedayat (in Persian: صادق هدایت; February 17, 1903, Tehran — 4 April 1951, Paris, France) was Iran's foremost modern writer of prose fiction and short stories.

Hedayat was born into a Iranian aristocratic family in Tehran and was educated at Collège Saint-Louis (French catholic school) and Dar ol-Fonoon (1914–1916). In 1925, he was among a selected few students who travelled to Europe to continue their studies. There, he initially went on to study engineering in Belgium, after a year he gave this up to study architecture in France. While there, he gave up architecture to pursue dentistry. In this period he became acquainted with Therese, a Parisian with whom he had a love affair. In 1927 Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the river Marne, however he was rescued by a fishing boat. After four years in France and Belgium, he finally surrendered his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930 without receiving a degree. In Iran he held various jobs for short periods.

Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore. The works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most. During his short literary life span, Hedayat published a substantial number of short stories and novelettes, two historical dramas, a play, a travelogue, and a collection of satirical parodies and sketches. His writings also include numerous literary criticisms, studies in Persian folklore, and many translations from Middle Persian and French. He is credited with having brought Persian language and literature into the mainstream of international contemporary writing. There is no doubt that Hedayat was the most modern of all modern writers in Iran. Yet, for Hedayat, modernity was not just a question of scientific rationality or a pure imitation of European values.

In his later years, feeling the socio-political problems of the time, Hedayat started attacking the two major causes of Iran's decimation, the monarchy and the clergy, and through his stories he tried to impute the deafness and blindness of the nation to the abuses of these two major powers. Feeling alienated by everyone around him, especially by his peers, Hedayat's last published work, The Message of Kafka, bespeaks melancholy, desperation and a sense of doom experienced only by those subjected to discrimination and repression.

Hedayat travelled and stayed in India from 1937 until 1939. In Bombay he completed and published his most enduring work, The Blind Owl, whose writing he started as early as 1930 in Paris. The book was praised by many including Henry Miller and André Breton. It has been called "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language".

At the end of 1950, Hedayat left Iran for Paris. There, on 4 April 1951, he committed suicide by gassing himself in a small rented apartment on 37 Rue Championnet. He had plugged all the gaps in the windows and door with cotton and, so it wouldn’t burden anyone, he had placed the money (a hundred thousand francs) for his shroud and burial in his side wallet in plain view. He was buried at the division 85 of Père Lachaise cemetery. His funeral was attended by a number of intimate friends and close acquaintances, both Iranian and Frenchmen.(From Wikipedia)

Khosrow Sinai

Khosrow Sinai (Persian: خسرو سینایی , born 19 January 1941 in Sari, Iran) is an Iranian film director. His works are usually based on social documentations. He was the first Iranian film director to win an international prize after the Islamic revolution in Iran.He is also known as an Iranian scholar and has been awarded the prestigious 'Knights Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic'. (From Wikipedia)

Houshang Golshiri Reads "Massive Explosion" (Farsi)

Houshang Golshiri

Houshang Golshiri (Persian: هوشنگ گلشیری; March 16 , 1938 — June 6, 2000) was an Iranian fiction writer, critic and editor. He was one of the first Iranian writers to use modern literary techniques, and is recognized as one of the most influential writers of Persian prose of the twentieth century.


Golshiri was born in Isfahan in 1938 and raised in Abadan. He came from a large family of modest circumstances. From 1955 to 1974, Golshiri lived in Isfahan, where he completed a bachelor's degree in Persian at the University of Isfahan and taught elementary and high school there and in surrounding towns.


Golshiri began writing fiction in the late 1950s. His publication of short stories in Payam-e Novin and elsewhere in the early 1960s, his establishment of Jong-e Isfahan (1965/73), the chief literary journal of the day published outside of, and his participation in efforts to reduce official censorship of imaginative literature brought him a reputation in literary circles.


Golshiri's first collection of short stories was As Always (1968). He became famous for his first novel Prince Ehtejab (1968/69). Translated in Literature East & West 20 (1980), it is the story of aristocratic decadence, implying the inappropriateness of monarchy for Iran. Shortly after production of the popular feature film based on the novel, Pahlavi authorities arrested Golshiri and incarcerated him for nearly six months.


An autobiographical and less successful novel called Christine and Kid came out in 1971, followed by a collection of short stories called My Little Prayer Room 1975, and a novel called Ra'i's Lost Lamb 1977.


In 1978, Golshiri travelled to the United States. Back in Iran in early 1979, Golshiri married Farzaneh Taheri whom he credits with editing his subsequent writing and was active in the revitalized Association of Iranian Writers, the editing of journals, literary criticism, and short-story writing. In the 1980s, he published The Fifth Innocent (1980), The Antique Chamber (1983), The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon (1984), and Five Treasures (1989), which he published in Stockholm during a visit to Europe in 1989. In 1990, under a pseudonym, Golshiri published a novella in translation called King of the Benighted, an indictment of Iranian monarchy, engage Persian literature, the Tudeh Party, and the Islamic Republic. A collection of Golshiri stories in translation was scheduled for publication in 1991 with the title Blood and Aristocrats and Other Stories.


In the winter of 1998 he published The Book of Genies and Struggle of Image with Painter, and in the autumn of 1999 he released a collection of articles called Garden in Garden.
In 1999 Golshiri was awarded the Erich-Maria Remarque Peace Prize for his struggle to promote democracy and human rights in Iran. (From Wikipedia)