Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
| Mahmoud Dowlatabadi | |
|---|---|
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - May 2016
|
|
| Born |
1 August 1940 Sabzevar, Iran |
| Occupation | Writer, Actor |
| Nationality | Iranian |
| Literary movement | Persian literature |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards |
Man Asian Literary Prize Jan Michalski Prize for Literature Legion of Honour |
| Spouse | Mehr Azad Maher (m. 1966) |
| Children | Siavash (b. 1972) Farhad (b. 1983) Sara (b. 1978) |
| Relatives | Abdolrasoul Dowlatabadi (Father) Fatemeh Dowlatabadi (Mother) |
| Website | |
| www |
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Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Persian: محمود دولتآبادی, Mahmud Dowlatâbâdi) (born 1 August 1940 in Dowlatabad, Sabzevar) is an Iranian writer and actor, known for his promotion of social and artistic freedom in contemporary Iran and his realist depictions of rural life, drawn from personal experience.
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born into a poor family of shoemakers in Dowlatabad, a remote village in Sabzevar, the northwestern part of Khorasan Province, Iran. He worked as a farmhand and attended Mas'ud Salman Elementary School. Books were a revelation to the young boy. He "read all the romances [available]... around the village". He "read on the roof of the house with a lamp…read War and Peace that way" while living in Tehran. Though his father had little formal education, he introduced Dowlatabadi to the Persian classical poets, Saadi Shirazi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi. His father generally spoke in the language of the great poets.
Nahid Mozaffari, who edited a PEN anthology of Iranian literature, said that Dowlatabadi "has an incredible memory of folklore, which probably came from his days as an actor or from his origins, as somebody who didn't have a formal education, who learned things by memorizing the local poetry and hearing the local stories."
As a teenager, Dowlatabadi took up a trade like his father and opened a barbershop. One afternoon, he found himself hopelessly bored. He closed the shop, gave the keys to a boy, and told him to tell his father, "Mahmoud's left." He caught a ride to Mashhad, where he worked for a year before leaving for Tehran to pursue theatre. There Dowlatabadi worked for a year before he could attened to take theatre classes. When he did, he rose to the top of his class, still doing numerous other jobs. He was an actor---and a shoemaker, barber, bicycle repairman, street barker, worker in cotton factory , and cinema ticket taker. Around this time he also ventured into journalism, fiction writing, and screenplays. He said in an interview "whenever I was done with work and wasn't preoccupied with finding food and so on, I would sit down and just write".
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Wikipedia