Most Iranian fiction remain under the influence of Romanticism and the spirit of Victor Hugo. Golshiri, on the other hand, exposes the multiple hypocrisies and weaknesses of his characters, including the intellectuals.…
Recently the Islamic State took aim at the only remaining wealth of the people: their hope.
Shahriar Mandanipour (Mondanipour), one of the most accomplished writers of contemporary Iranian literature, has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, Boston College, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He has been a visiting professorship at Brown University, where he taught courses in Persian literature and cinema. He also has taught creative writing at Tufts University.
Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, and his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers. His honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran. Mandanipour is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays in literary theory, literature and art criticism, creative writing, censorship, and social commentary. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after 9 years of publishing was banned. Some of his short stories and essays have been published in anthologies such as Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Fiction and Sohrab’s Wars: Counter Discourses of Contemporary Persian Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories and a Film Script; and in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Short works have been published in France, Germany, Denmark, and in languages such Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish. Mandanipour’s first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (translated by Sara Khalili and published by Knopf in 2009) was very well received (Los Angeles Times, Guardian, New York Times, etc.). Censoring an Iranian Love Story was named by the New Yorker one of the reviewers’ favorites of 2009, by the Cornell Daily Sun as Best Book of the Year for 2009, and by NPR as one of the best debut novels of the year; it was awarded (Greek ed.) the Athens Prize for Literature for 2011. The novel has been translated and published in 11 other languages and in 13 countries throughout the world.
Mandanipour’s second novel appearing in English, Moon Brow (translated by Sara Khalili and published by Restless Books in 2018) has been published in France, Germany…