In Dialogue with Farhad Hasanzadeh
Interview by Dr. Neda Farnia & Dr. Johari Murray, CooterMag
So far he has published over 130 books in various genres such as short stories, novels, fables, fantasy, comedy, biographies, and rewritings for children, young adults, and also adults. He has received more than 40 national awards and is one of the best writers for children and young adults in Iran.
Hasanzadeh has been Iran’s nominee for the Astrid Lindgren (ALMA) in 2023. He’s also twice shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2018 and 2020. He has several books in White Raven’s Lists. Furthermore, more than 30 of his works have been translated and published in English, Swedish, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, etc.
So let’s read this wonderful interview with Mr. Farhad Hasanzadeh.
Dr. Neda Farnia & Dr. Johari Murray (NF & JM): Mr. Hasanzadeh, thank you so much for accepting Cootermag’s interview request. As for our first question, would you please talk a bit about your childhood in Abadan? What is your favorite childhood memory?
Farhad Hasanzadeh (FH): Since I was the fifth child in the family, I was not my parents’ favorite much, and I grew up more influenced by my siblings than my parents, and of course, my grandmother, who was the do-it-all of the family and whom we called Bibi. She was the one who chose my name and among Ahmad, Akbar, Zahra, etc., which were all religious names, I was named Farhad, which was a model of love, perseverance, and hard work in Persian literature. This name has been mentioned in Persian literature in Persian poetry and romantic sonnets. Our financial situation was also average, and after a period of grueling work in the oil company, my father, quit this job, and started his own business. The Coca-Cola Company had made a sign for the entrance to my father’s small shop that I could read at the age of seven: “Hasanzadeh’s Grocery Store.” My father’s grocery store was a place for me to get to know myself, the people, and the city that was growing and coming to life under the shadow of the largest refinery in the Middle East.
One of the images I remember is my sisters reading magazines. My older sister bought and read “Zan Ruz” magazine [Literally translated as Women, Today] every week. I remember one day she gave me money to buy “Zan Ruz” for her from the newsstand, but I liked “Kayhan Bachaha” [a journal for children] more, which was full of children’s stories and poems, and I bought it. But leafing through “Zan Ruz” magazine was also a special pleasure for me, and sometimes my sister would read the “At a Crossroads” column out loud to the others. A column in which women and girls who had family problems consulted with the magazine’s counselor, which was of course full of dramatic stories that deeply engaged my mind.
NF & JM: What did you want to be when you grew up? When did you realize you wanted to write for the younger generation and to be a writer?
FH: I loved art, but I didn’t think about being a children’s writer. At school, even though I wasn’t good at studying, I loved artistic and cultural activities. I would make a wall newspaper all by myself, and I would write poems, stories, and scientific articles in beautiful handwriting and put them on the wall. In extracurricular classes, even though I was a shy and introverted boy and sometimes stuttered, I don’t know why I went to the performing drama classes, and we performed plays with a few other students in a class called “Drama”, which was our last class on Thursdays. A little later, I got to know about the activities done at the Intellectual Development Center for Children and Adolescents (IDCCA) and I was drawn to this center. We had gone there to perform a play, but we found everything there; from colored cardboard to pastels, gouache, and markers for drawing, as well as cameras for photography, filmmaking equipment, and even musical instruments. The librarians there were also great and helpful. In the first year, our theater group rehearsed and performed three plays, and we performed them at IDCCA centers in Abadan, Khorramshahr, Ahvaz, and throughout the city. I was the author of one of these three plays. I still remember the first session I went to. Our instructor divided us into three groups and told us to write a text for practice and performance and bring it next week. The students used books and folktales to help them, but as soon as class ended, I walked home and made up a story in my mind. A simple and romantic story, but in poetic and melodious language. The encouragement that I got for this play gave me self-confidence, so I got the feeling that I could show myself better by writing stories. After that, I wrote short stories and poems, but a few years later, the Iran-Iraq war began.
Iraq launched air and ground attacks on our country and city, and we migrated to safe places. This war lasted eight years [from September 1980 to August 1988], and I spent part of my life in migration and exile. I took up hard work to make a living and strayed from the path I had started. I wrote less and, along with arts such as photography and painting, worked more as a laborer to earn a living and support my family. It was during the last years of the war that I got married and started a family. The birth of my son and spending time with him changed me. At night, I would make up and tell him custom-made children’s stories at bedtime. The birth of these stories made me want to share them with more children and think about publishing them. At that time, we were living in Shiraz, and I felt that most literary and artistic events were happening in the capital, so we moved from Shiraz to Tehran with the intention of growing, and getting to know others, and connecting with more people.
NF & JM: Do you think there is a difference between writing for children, young adults and adults? For which group is it easier to write? Which one is your favorite?
FH: Among my books, about five are for adults and the rest are for children and teenagers. I myself don’t really know why children play a prominent role in my writings. As the younger ones use “default,” I’d also say the “default” world of my fiction is children and teenagers. Every idea I find for my stories, I first look at it from their perspective without making any effort. This angle [talking from the eyes of a child] is very special and challenging, and I take it as a technique in narration, and I think not everyone is good at it. On the other hand, I consider it important to address the concerns of this age group. We simply say children and teenagers, while this age group is a wide spectrum and not every child can be viewed with the same lens. Especially the world of adolescence, which is a limbo between childhood and youth, and teenagers at this age face new experiences of knowing themselves and the world around them, which is sensitive and complicated.
Sometimes, when writing a story, I don’t think about the audience at all, I just let the story flow and decide everything on its own. After finishing the story, based on my relative knowledge of the audience, I rewrite it in a language appropriate to them. But sometimes I write for a specific audience. For example, when I was working with children’s magazines, we had meetings to compose and produce stories. Well, there I wrote stories with the aim of the magazine’s audience of millions. Or when I was the editor of the literature and humor department of the weekly “Bicycle Magazine,” I experimentally gained a relative familiarity with children’s taste and level of knowledge and understanding, and my stories were purposeful.
There are also a number of stories that are universal, which I call free-size. They are layered, and each audience interprets them through their own understanding of the world.
NF & JM: Do you have a special place to write?
FH: Writing in our country is not a professional job through which to become financially independent by selling books, and I have gone through different periods when I took it up as a profession. When I first settled in Tehran, I would write my stories in the silence of my 50-meter house between midnight and 4 am (the working hours of the sweepers). During the five-day Nowruz holidays, I wouldn’t go on trips or attend parties with my family. I would convince myself that these days were fleeting, and that I had to write before the city grew busy and work resumed, and then… Or I would write some stories on benches or chess tables in parks (due to the location of the house). I remember that I wrote my novel, Hasti, in the solitude and silence of a publishing house’s warehouse. Also, on cold autumn or winter days, after office hours, my office desk would become a writer’s desk, and I would take advantage of the silence there. So over the past few years, I have gotten used to not getting used to anything and using every opportunity to write. For some time now, I have rented an independent office for myself, where I hold creative writing workshops and which is also a private place to write. Of course, I don’t have to be in the middle of the forest or by the sea to enjoy the silence of nature, and one of my habits is to put earbuds in my ears so that I don’t hear the honking of cars, the roar of motorcycles, and the loudspeakers of street vendors. Along with that, I drink three cups of coffee a day, and snacks like raisin chickpeas and chips are also abundant on my desk!
NF & JM: How do you get inspiration for your new books?
FH: Ideas come from many places. For a writer who is constantly thinking about stories and has the gift of writing, ideas come from the sky and the earth. Among my books, the ideas of those that are realistic come from my own lived experience. I have spent difficult days during and after the war and have tried various jobs: from a worker in a textile factory to a janitor in a carpet shop, a photography studio, and an ice cream shop. That is why I have met many people and have many anecdotes in my mind. Apart from these lived experiences, I have also been a journalist. For years, when I came to the newspaper office, one of my tasks was to read the newspaper and pay special attention to the events page. Whenever I came across an interesting news item, I would take a pair of scissors and cut it out, so that I could write it down or include it somewhere in my writings. You know I am very playful and can’t really focus on what I hear. Sometimes, in the middle of a serious office meeting, I would pick up a pen and paper, write a short story, or draw a picture, and after the meeting, I would create a story from it. Sometimes, I would give myself a commission, meaning when I feel a topic is missing in our literature, I go for it because I think it would be good to work on concepts that children need. Then, with that topic as a priority, I start creating a story.
NF & JM: How do you choose the titles of your books? Some are really unique and creative, like, Hammam’s Symphony, Raisin-Sweet Smiles for a Happy Family, Call me Ziba, An Umbrella with White Butterflies, and etc.
FH: For me, the name of the story is also an important part of it. So I use this capacity to strengthen and connect my stories. Sometimes it takes me a week to write a short story, but choosing a name takes me a month! Sometimes I turn to friends or my audience to choose a name—one with a soul, a name that not only reveals the story but holds its own tale within. I have a short story for young adults called “The Compass.” There is no compass in this story, but the character’s situation is such that one of his feet is on a mine and if he takes his foot off, it will explode, and he spends a day and night standing on the mine reviewing his past. For me, he looked like a compass, not a human being. Or in Call Me Ziba, Ziba in Persian is a girl’s name, but it also means beautiful. I was concerned about its name for a long time, so that I could make a pun out of it. It is a play between the name of the character and the beauty of life. So I chose Ziba so that it could be read in three ways, and this was interesting for both me and the readers of the book. They sometimes ask how it’s read, and I reply, “However you like it!”
NF & JM: Have you ever been forced to change a title because of a publisher’s demand or other reasons?
FH: Yes. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it happens during the process of publishing a book. For example, An Umbrella with White Butterflies was at first An Umbrella with White Stars, which I had seen in reality. Then, when I was telling the illustrator about the philosophy of the story and mentioned the “butterfly effect” that small acts of kindness can have a profound impact on the lives of others, she was supposed to draw butterflies in the book and I changed the name of the book to: An Umbrella with White Butterflies. On the other hand, sometimes the publishers have their own comments and see both sides of the story: they also see the economic dimensions and the publishing market, and sometimes they say that this name is not attractive to the audience.
NF & JM: What’s your idea about censorship in Iran? Have they ever changed some of your sentences or removed some parts without your consent? What did you do?
FH: As I said earlier, I’ve worked for years in the largest newspaper in Iran, in the section of the “Bicycle Magazine.” There were many sensitivities there and we worked with obsession, because the Hamshahri Newspaper belonged to the Tehran municipality, and they said that any mistake could lead to the newspaper being closed down and the mayor being questioned and a political scandal. Though the “Bicycle Magazine” was not political and we did not work on political news at all, the magazine was mostly literary, artistic and entertaining. But the world of politics, which does not understand these things, takes its own interpretation of a story scene because it has power and wealth and messes up the game. So, we had learned to write and provide information in a way that would not cause sensitivity. In my books, I have always had my own critical view. That is, while maintaining the boundaries I knew, I tried to write about the world of children and their concerns and not to censor myself. For example, I have written about [taboo issues such as] love in adolescence, rape, or family conflicts, and the conflict between tradition and modernity. Sometimes they made comments on what I’d written, but I said the same thing in a different and more complex way. In some instances, however, I have just forgotten about publishing the story altogether.
NF & JM: Oh, such a pity! But which one of your books do you like the most?
FH: Every book has its own characteristics and a hidden experience for its author. I love every one of my books from a different perspective, and if I didn’t love them in the first place, I wouldn’t have published them at all. For example, I love Hasti because I questioned the taboos in our society, and I also loved the courage of girls alongside the storyline of life in war. I love Call Me Ziba more than Hasti, though, because it has hidden layers originating from my subconscious. Or I love Kooti Kooti’s Tales for their childlike humor that resembles the childhood of today’s children. I also love An Umbrella with White Butterflies for its innovative storytelling, which weaves three narratives so seamlessly that they become inseparable. Its message resonates deeply, while remaining beautifully rooted in the Persian tradition of Nowruz.
NF & JM: Which one of your characters is your favorite? Do you look like any of your characters?
FH: I think writers always leave a part of their personality in their stories. I have left my childhood mischief in Kooti Kooti series. But a writer’s personality is not simply what she or he lives. Rather, a part of the writer’s personality has been formed in their unconscious but has not had the opportunity to manifest. This is where the writer reveals this hidden part in the characters of their stories. I really like the character of “Kholou” in Bombak’s Scorpions. He represents a part of my adolescence in Abadan, where, despite being poor, he lives a happy and romantic life.
NF & JM: As a writer, a critic and also as a parent how do you look at the world, and the teenagers? Do you find it challenging to write for the present generation, as compared to your audience of let’s say 20 years ago?
FH: I have not faced any challenges in what I’ve written so far. But I think that the world is slowly changing and the fear of distancing myself from my audience is showing itself. I may no longer recognize the teenagers of today and tomorrow as they are. A recognition that is neither gained from psychology books nor from living with them. Because my brain network no longer functions as it used to. In fact, it has nothing to do with me. The speed of change is beyond my cognitive power. It is as if a force beyond what was in the past has come to the fore and changed priorities, and this is terrifying.
However, I am happy with some human concepts that are eternal, such as love, affection, family, experiences of failure and victory in life, and etc., which are common to all societies. But I cope with the challenges and do my own job. That is, I do not swoon over the audience under the pretext of being there, but I try to draw them towards me. One of the challenges was, for example, in one of my YA novels This Weblog will be Transferred. The novel deals with love that is taken from our classical and romantic literature. A teenage boy who stays in Abadan in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war to take care of the house of the girl he loves; he who holds the key to the girl’s house, waters the flower pots and garden over the years hoping for a day when she would return to the city. His patience and the separation lasted thirty years and he is still waiting. Perhaps this thirty-year patience, which is a lifetime, is acceptable to my generation and a sign of deep human love for another human being, but for some teenage readers, this novel was unbelievable and ridiculous. Because they witness fleeting and momentary love. Perhaps if I had written this novel in a linear and classical form, it would have been completely rejected, but I wrote it in the format of blogging, which is close to the world of today’s teenagers. The pages of the novel are full of posts and comments, and even Windows errors. In this novel, I have created a link between the thoughts and concerns of people of a generation that have classical beliefs, with the tools and thinking of a generation that receives its beliefs from the virtual world.
NF & JM: Now could you tell us a bit about your experience as a creative writing teacher to children and adolescents?
FH: For several years now, I have been conducting online creative writing workshops for both children and teenagers. So far, I have had more than a thousand students. The children are very good. They are very important and they don’t know it themselves. Each of them is a world and I can’t help but be captivated by the sparkle in their eyes when they greet me from behind their monitors and talk about themselves. Or when they read a story and wait for me to say a few sentences about their story. Their stories may have problems in terms of structure and plot, but it is our fault if we find problems in their works because we want them to try to write within our frameworks. I try not to look for problems and point out the bright spots in their works: seeing and describing well, paying enough attention to things, and to innovations, puns, and word formations and etc. In fact, I learn how to see the world from them, not they from me. Diversity in children is also amazing. Some of them are happy and free. Some clearly have problems, and their stories reveal a transcript of their thoughts, personalities, and families. Some of them even come to us on the advice of counselors and psychologists. However, the important thing is that they trust and love this white-haired man, and I think that when they grow up, they will have good memories of these gatherings. For me, who has to live within the framework of adulthood, being with them is both energizing and a way to achieve a kind of lightness and liberation.
NF & JM: What’s your opinion on Children’s Literature in the world and in Iran?
FH: Children’s literature in Iran is still in its infancy compared to Europe. I mean the children’s literature that has been shaped by recognizing childhood. The same literature that was founded after the European Industrial Revolution, based on the knowledge and development of childhood. Otherwise, in Persian literature, we do have various stories, legends, and poems that children can relate to, but were not written specifically for them. For instance, the stories in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, are both in the language of poetry and full of fantasy and strange stories of heroes, kings, and legendary creatures. Or the tales that are adapted for children today from poetry of Saadi, Rumi, and Nizami. Therefore, in Iran, children’s literature in its modern form is still going through a period of experience and recognition. Our literature has a lot to say because it relies on a history of several thousand years. In our country, there are prominent writers and illustrators whose works are world-famous. But anyway, we live in a region of the world where everything is unstable or at least less stable. Living in the Middle East has taught us not to count on our possessions and to always be prepared for hardship and crisis. This is what makes our literature realistic; educating people to withstand the hardships and suffering of life, creating self-confidence and strengthening the sense of humanity and kindness, and avoiding war and warmongering.
NF & JM: What do you think of the future of Children’s Literature in the world?
FH: To be honest, I’m not much of an observer, but experience tells me that everything is changing and shedding its skin. If in the past it took years for a development in science and industry to cause a revolution in societies, such as the invention of metal and paper or printing and electricity industries, etc., in today’s world, we witness revolutions and developments in different fields every day. Among all this, I feel that children’s literature has found its place more than before and is taking advantage of its capacities to cultivate the spirit and mind of children. Although the growth of social networks and entertaining games has become tough competitors for children’s literature, parents are more careful about their children and seek help from books to develop and guide their children, which means that literature can still be a savior.
NF & JM: Nicely said! As for our last question, what’s the message you’d like to give the whole world?
I want the people of the world to save the world themselves. The world is tired of wars and conflicts that adults start, and women and children are the victims. Today’s polluted world is like an old and worn-out house that needs to be renovated. And who better than children can put new paint on this old canvas?
NF & JM: Such wonderful insights!
Thank you so much once again, dear Mr. Hasanzadeh, for your concern and your time! We’re sure that the world will enjoy learning about your ideas, and by sharing them, we do hope that we’re able to give new insights to people and scholars from around the world. Well, our final objective is to leave a better world for the generations to come. Let’s have faith in the power of Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
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Via CooterMag
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