Houshang Golshiri (Culture/History)

1937/38?-2000.

One of the most gifted and influential writers of his time, Golshiri was born in Isfahan and raised in Abadan, and thus brought a fresh and unexpected vision to the Persian fiction of his time, which had become increasingly based in Tehran. Golshiri's family returned to Isfahan, where he finished high school, and where he went on to attend the University of Isfahan. Upon graduation, he began teaching at various elementary and high schools in the region. His increasing political activism landed him in jail in 1962. By the mid-1960s, Golshiri had published a potpourri of poems and short stories, and then was instrumental in establishing Jong-e Isfahan, a progressive literary journal that quickly moved to the vanguard of Iranian fiction. Between 1965 and 1973, Jong-e Isfahan was among the leading literary journals of the time, initiating some serious critical discussions about the nature and function of fiction.

Golshiri had begun writing fiction in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s his short stories and poems were appearing in various literary journals. His first collection of short stories, Mesl-e Hamisheh (As Always, 1968), announced a major literary voice—confident, defiant, with detailed attention to a range of prose and narrative techniques. But it was not until the publication of Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) that the Tehrani literary critics had to pay a visit to Isfahan. This novel was adapted into a film by Bahman Farmanara in 1974: see Prince Ehtejab.

Golshiri's second novel, Christine va Kid (Christine and the Kid, 1971), was not as critically acclaimed as Prince Ehtejab, but as an experiment in autobiographical narrative it was a tour de force of unparalleled daring and experimentation—staccato phrases, broken and unreliable memories, miniature-like narrative depictions, implication of the reader in the narrative, and many other similar tropes. His political activities then once again landed him in jail for about six months in 1973.

At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Golshiri was active in organizing the famous "Ten Nights" of poetry and prose readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, a watershed of revolutionary mobilization against the Pahlavi regime. In the summer of 1978, he was invited to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. While in the US he gave a series of lectures to Iranian students across the country.