Shahriar Mandanipour

Shahriar Mandanipour (Persian: شهریار مندنی پور‎‎; born February 15, 1957, Shiraz, Iran) is a novelist and essayist in modern Persian literature.

Mandanipour was born and raised in Shiraz. In 1975 he moved to Tehran and studied Political Sciences at Tehran University, graduating in 1980. In 1981, he enlisted in the army for his military service. To experience war and to write about it, he volunteered to join the front during the Iran-Iraq war and served there as an officer for eighteen months.

Following his military service, Mandanipour returned to Shiraz where he worked as director of the Hafiz Research Center and director of the National Library of Fars. In 1998, he became chief editor of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal.

In 2006, Mandanipour traveled to the United States as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. In 2007 and 2008 he was a writer in residence at Harvard University and in 2009 at Boston College. In September 2011, Mandanipour returned to Brown University as a visiting professor of literary arts where he currently teaches contemporary Persian literature and modern Iranian cinema.

Mandanipour started writing at the age of fourteen and published his first short story, Shadows of the Cave, in 1985 in the literary journal Mofid Magazine. In 1989, his first collection of short stories was published under the same title.

Regarded as one of the most accomplished and promising writers of contemporary Iranian literature, Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, as well as his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers alike. In his stories, Mandanipour creates his own unique surreal world in which illusion seems as real as terrifying reality. The nightmares and realisms of his stories are rooted in the historical horrors and sufferings of the people of Iran.

At the outset, Mandanipour’s stories are enigmatic, yet they jolt awake the reader’s imagination and provoke him or her to peel away the intricately woven and fused layers in which past and present, and tradition and modernity collide. His characters do not conform to conventional molds. Traditional identities are blurred as the lines between right and wrong, friend and foe, sanity and insanity become fluid. Often driven by the most basic human instincts of fear, survival and loneliness, Mandanipour’s characters struggle in a world of contradictions and ambiguities and grapple with self-identity, social dilemmas, and everyday life.

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