Reza Baraheni

Festival Participant

Reza Baraheni is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism, is now Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He has taught in the University of Tehran, the University of Texas in Austin, Indiana University, the University of Maryland and York University. He has also been a Fellow at the University of Iowa, and a Fellow at Oxford University. From 1982, the year he was fired from the University of Tehran for his advocacy of equal rights for Iranian women, to 1996, the year of his forced departure from Iran, he taught courses in creative writing and literary theory, first at the home of friends and former students, and later at the basement of his own apartment. A former prisoner of both the Shah’s regime and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Baraheni has been in the forefront of the struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran since 1964. He is a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran, a member of International PEN, and was President of PEN Canada from June 2001-June 2003. An original writer and signatory of the Text of 134 Iranian Writers and the charter of the Writers Association of Iran, Baraheni has been active in the forefront of the struggle for democracy in his original country Iran and everywhere in the world during the last four decades.

His fiction has been anthologized along with works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; his poetry along with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Paul Eluard and Pablo Neruda and both have appeared in many anthologies. His works have been translated into a dozen languages, among them: Dutch, English, French, German, French, Russian and Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. He has also written poetry and prose, originally in English. His poetry has appeared in Time Magazine, City Lights Anthology, the New York Review of Books, the American Poetry Review, and many other prestigious periodicals.