Reading in Iran: Literature That Crosses Borders

Photo of Saless Bookstore, Tehran by Sepideh Nazaralizadeh. Courtesy World Literature Today

by Poupeh Missaghi, Emad Mortazavi, Leili Entezari, Rafa Rostami & Moeen Farrokhi, World Literature Today 

Many years ago, in the old days of dial-up internet, when I was still living in Iran, I would spend time reading book reviews online, making a list, and then passing on that list, via email or phone calls, to whoever would soon be visiting Tehran from the US. In a market closed to the outside world, with no global credit or debit cards, no possibility for online orders, no reliable US–Iran postal services, the only option was to put together a network of friends and family travelers who would purchase and deliver via their suitcases. (One particular book that found its way to me in Tehran was Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth, translated by Chris Andrews, which changed my literary trajectory in many ways. At that time, it had just been released.)

Fast-forward to years ahead, during the 2000s and 2010s. I was living in the US, as an MA and later PhD student, traveling back to Tehran once or twice a year during my academic breaks. Now I would play that role for friends, buying books here and taking them back with me in my suitcase. One friend, a translator and bibliophile who had an expansive personal library, would sometimes send me dozens of Amazon links, for a wide range of books of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, often ordering secondhand for better prices. Many times, it was through his lists that I’d be introduced to authors whose works excited me.

Fast-forward to today. I have not been back to Iran for more than five years. When World Literature Today asked me to write about what Iranians are reading these days and the trends in the literary market, I immediately remembered a video I watched some years ago of a famous Iranian author, of an older generation, who has been living in exile in the US for many years. In part of the conversation, she noted that she continued to closely follow the literary landscape within Iran. Minutes later, someone in the audience asked her opinion about a recent novel by a younger female author in Iran that had gotten a lot of critics’ and the public’s attention. The exiled author said she had not heard about the young author and that book. The reality of that kind of disconnect has terrified me since.

Even today, despite all the access we have—through social media accounts run by a variety of participants in the literary landscape, public groups on platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, as well as personal groups and one-on-one chats with friends and peers—I am aware that there is still so much that I am missing. Nothing can replace the experience of walking into bookstores, browsing, and chancing upon titles, or being suggested a title by a bookseller who knows you and your literary taste; having in-person meetings with publishers and editors; or sitting around dinner and tea with friends and sharing literary joys and horror stories. What the lived experience offers nothing can. That is why I decided to reach out to a few people on the ground in Tehran and ask them to share with me their observations and insights. The following is what they—a translator and PhD student in anthropology, a journalist/book editor, a bookseller, a translator, and a photographer—sent me.

—poupeh missaghi

Freudian Typo

At the Hayward Gallery: A New Take on Empire and Childhood Lore with Freudian Typo

Artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi explore the echoes of British imperialism through nursery rhymes, sculpture, and satire.

Freudian Typo, Black Line and the Edifice (Installation mock up), 2025. Image courtesy the artist, the Hayward Gallery and Art Plugged.

by Art Plugged

This summer, the Hayward Gallery will present Freudian Typo, a new exhibition by Iranian-Canadian artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi that reconsiders Britain’s imperial past through the lens of nursery rhymes.

The show, produced in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.), uses familiar children’s verses such as The Old Woman and Her Pig to explore themes of debt, exploitation and collapse. Drawing from historical records and folklore, the artists reimagine these rhymes as reflections of economic and political systems, both past and present.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi of Freudian Typo say: “We’re engaged in a mode of practice that maintains that art emerges through engagement with critical discourse, where dialogue and dialectics serve both as our methodology and medium. The complementary aspects of our work renders collaboration not merely as a beneficial addition but as an essential necessity. Our commitment to critical exchange defines our collective horizon, positioning the dynamic and discursive mode of art-making as the most compelling path forward.”

An alternative political reality

Nazanin Noori’s Acts of Witness

At Auto Italia, London, the artist’s work interrogates Iran’s recent political history 

Nazanin Noori, ‘THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Auto Italia, London and Frieze; photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards.

by Kimi Zarate-Smith, Frieze

In 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, stopped by authorities in Tehran for allegedly not wearing the hijab to government standards, died after being severely beaten whilst in police custody. Amini’s death sparked the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests, calling for an end to the systemic oppression of women and girls within contemporary Iran.

At Auto Italia, Iranian artist Nazanin Noori’s first UK exhibition, ‘THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST’, responds to this recent political history. At the front of the gallery, THE PARTY OF GOD / WELL DID WE LIVE (2024) features the Farsi phrase معذرت (I’m sorry) in yellow acrylic against a green industrial tarp curtain, inverting the colours of the Hezbollah militant group’s flag. With this work, Noori posits the notion that despots might one day apologize, although the alternative future she envisions is an uneasy hypothetical – one that remains unrealized and is, perhaps, fundamentally unattainable. 

An alarming red glow emanates from the gallery’s second room, where the thick ruby carpeting of the first space is augmented by deep scarlet lighting. At the centre, in stark contrast, stands a circle of 12 white plastic Monobloc chairs. Suffused in red, once visitors assume their seats, the space looms with judgement, witness facing witness.

Foreigner

Nahid Rachlin, Novelist Who Explored the Iranian Psyche, Dies at 85

One of the first Iranian novelists to write in English, she examined the clash between East and West. Her debut novel, “Foreigner,” provided insight into pre-revolutionary Iran.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” was published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979. Courtesy New York Times and W.W. Norton & Company

by Rebecca Chao, New York Times

Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer who defied her parents’ expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English, died on April 30 in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was a stroke.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979, depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil.

“There is a subtle shift in ‘Foreigner’ that is fascinating to watch,” Anne Tyler, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, wrote in a review for The New York Times in 1979, “a nearly imperceptible alteration of vision as Feri begins to lose her westernized viewpoint.”

“What is apparent to Feri at the start — the misery and backwardness of Iranian life — becomes less apparent,” Ms. Tyler continued. “Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is merely sterile while Iran is passionate and openhearted?”

Verses of Life:

A Review of ‘Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution’, edited by Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom

Courtesy Guernica Editions.

by Daniel James Sharp, The Freethinker

Are poets really ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in 1821? This is a question on which the jury has been deliberating since long before there were any such things as modern juries. And this is the question explicitly posed in a new collection of poems edited by Iranian-born Canadian poet Bänoo Zan and freelance editor Cy Strom, Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution.

This collection gathers a range of poets—Iranians and non-Iranians, exiles and emigrants, the certain and the uncertain—who share a single purpose: to declare and embody solidarity with the people, especially the women, of Iran, whose decades-long struggle against theocracy was revivified and intensified by the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini in 2022 for wearing ‘improper’ hijab. Even if these poets are not on the ground in Iran, ‘doing the necessary work’ in Strom’s introductory words, they can bear witness. The struggle is a universal and human one, in other words: ‘No one population or culture is the only victim of the oppressor, the only body engaged in the struggle.’ The revolutionary ferment which followed Amini’s death was nigh-unprecedented in Iran, or indeed in any other country, though one might stop short of declaring it, as Strom does, ‘the first ever feminist revolution’.

“Humour helps overcome the fear imposed by dictatorship”

Mana Neyestani, who lives in exile in France, is among Iran’s best-known political cartoonists. In this interview, he talks about freedom of thought, red lines, and why political satire is especially important in authoritarian countries.

Cartoon by Iranian artist Mana Neyestani. Courtesy D+C.

Interview by Eva-Maria Verfürth, D+C

Mana Neyestani’s life has not always gone as he would have wished: One of his children’s cartoons sparked uprisings in Iran in 2006 and he was sent to the notorious Evin prison. After three months in custody, he fled Iran and travelled via Malaysia to France, where he was granted asylum. He continues to draw cartoons about life in Iran, but also about exile and migration. Social media helps him disseminate his cartoons in his home country and worldwide. Almost one million people follow him on Instagram.

Eva-Maria: Mana, you once said that you’re not a genuinely political person. Yet you’re one of the most famous Iranian political cartoonists. How did you become a political artist?

Mana: It’s true that I prefer to follow cultural and cinematic news. However, living in a country like Iran inevitably makes you political. The country is controlled by a totalitarian religious regime that interferes with every aspect of private life. I believe the most fundamental role of an artist, even the least political one, is to think freely. But in a dictatorship, especially a religious one, thinking freely is itself a crime and a form of political resistance.