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Farkhondeh Hajizadeh
Farkhondeh Hajizadeh is a quintessential Persian storyteller, writer, poet, founder of Vistar Publishing House, a member of the Writers’ Association of Iran since 1990, and the first winner of the “Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award” in recognition of her courage, resilience, and commitment to excellence in publishing books possessing cachet by the “Association of American Publishers” in 2003 – with Arthur Miller, Russell Banks, Edward Said, Arthur Schlesinger, and Thomas Friedman in attendance. She was subsequently awarded the honorary membership in “The American Literary Association” for a year.

Farkhondeh was born in 1952 in a remote hamlet, a bucolic setting on the tulip-ridden slopes of Kerman’s mountains. Charmed by the rich literary quilt of her land, she grew an affinity for literature since her budding years, defining her future life. Honed yet victimized by a millennia-old culture imbued with unbending indigenous traditions of the desert’s rim, she had much to say.

The endemic customs made a bride of her at thirteen and a mother at fourteen contrary to her accord. After bearing her second child at eighteen, she resumed her education (forsaken due to her compulsory wedlock) by transcending the barriers idiosyncratic to a patriarchal society, advancing into the milieu of higher learning of Iranian literature in later years.

She launched her erudite expedition by composing Ghazals, and in 1974, joined the Khajavi Literary Association in Kerman, where she was encouraged to foray into prose. The Ayandeghan newspaper published her first Op-ed in 1975.

Her career began in 1978 and spanned thirty years – first as a teacher – but the school she taught was closed for having deemed anti-revolutionary. In 1980, she worked as a librarian at Kerman University, where she founded and managed the Department of Iranian Literature's library in 1986. She set off writing an anthology on religions and mythology during her tenure.

In 1988, she wrote her first story, The Green Illusion, a nuanced critique of established beliefs clung to by her compatriots.

In 1989, she worked as a librarian at the University of Tehran while attending (studying comparative literature for seven years) the writing workshops chaired by the late Reza Barehani, an Iranian novelist, poet, and literary critic – patronized by a clique of notable Iranian poets and writers at his basement, eluding the Islamist authorities viewing freedom of the pen an existential threat to their archaic reign.

Farkhondeh has undertaken a myriad of cultural and literary endeavors, such as directorship of Baya magazine and Ghal o Maghal periodical, memberships in the Children’s Book Association, Publishers’ Association and Book Distribution Association, holding night poetry and book reading sessions for elementary and high school students at Vistar, her publishing house, launching story-writing classes, establishing a library for the Publishers Association, and lending aid to found the Association of Women Publishers and the Association of Literary Women.

In 2000, as keynote speaker, she attended conferences on Iranian Contemporary Literature at New York University and Columbia University, the Nima Literary Association in Chicago, and the Odeon Theater in Paris. In 2004, she participated in seminars on Contemporary Turkish Literature in Ankara and Istanbul. She has also been a regular participant in the Iranian university seminars.

Farkhondeh owns her characteristic writing style. Her stories are unique and multi-dimensional. The characters are real. Each speaks in his/her tongue – whom she adroitly enters and gives depth. She is conscious of the hidden human psychic layers.

In lieu of the suffocating loquacity employed by the Iranian literati, she opts for a docile, economized prose, pliantly suiting the occasion and character. In Iran, she is a pioneer of the “stream of consciousness,” penning the sea of thoughts passing through the mind.

As a kaleidoscope crackling with symbolism, metaphor, and innuendo, delicately cocooned in the garb of protest literature to evade censorship, she makes faces at an ad feminism culture – and lays bare the flaws in its mythology, religiosity, and governance in a colloquial, ad libitum, and free-floating tongue. As a staunch advocate of women’s rights and an iconoclast caught in the intransigent web of her gender-segregated habitat, she grabs her societal taboos and paradoxes by the throat – and cries for freedom from bondage through her piercing words.

..., And she tells of a perennial human pain in a nation once boasted as the cradle of civilization, tempered by war and carnage, flourished and stigmatized by a rich culture, pendant between tradition and modernity, ..., posing the same questions..., the same answers..., “Oh me, Oh life, of the questions of these recurring...,”

Her brother, Hamid, a teacher and poet, and nephew, Karun, were luridly butchered to death as a part of the governmental-sponsored serial killings in 1998 intended to silence the intelligentsia challenging the yoke of a totalitarian theocracy – engendering a traumatic experience. Despite the threat of persecution, she bravely refused to stay silent and was exposed to retribution aplenty.

The Vistar Publishing House she founded and managed for ten years, a place of gathering for writers, poets, and literature enthusiasts, was ransacked and shut down by the regime in 2006.

Some of her works are as follows:

1.     Against Democracy (Short Story Collection)

2.     Literary/Artistic Discourse (in collaboration with other writers)

3.     I Fear for Your Eyes (Fiction)

4.     Mythology and Religions (Bibliography)

5.     Sohhrab’s Chest (Story 1)

6.     To The One Who Was Not My Murderer (Short Story Collection)

7.     Is Non-Arab Woman Better or TNT (Story2)

8.     Rethinking 1 (Literary Critique)

9.     Talaat, It’s Me! (Poetry collection)

10. Mansur, Albright, & I (Novel)

11. I Declare! (Poetry Collection)

12. It Doesn’t Match, Mr. Translator! (Bilingual Story Collection)

13. That One (Bilingual Story Collection)

14. Exile (Memoirs-Iran)

15. If Only Respecting Paper (Poetry Collection)

Her books have been translated into English, Italian, Czech, Turkish, and Kurdish.