Thirty-three essential fiction titles by Iranian writers

The work of British-born, Iranian-American artist Niloufar Talebi appears in a variety of media, often inspired by Iranian culture while taking great leaps into Western art forms. The vision driving her work is to address the invisibility and erasure of non-dominant voices through projects of cultural translation. Foundational to her projects are literary texts that she authors, translates, curates, and remixes.

Niloufar is the author of Self-Portrait in Bloom (2019).

At Lit Hub she shared a list of 33 essential works of fiction by Iranian writers, including:

Dalia Sofer, Man of My Time
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Set in Iran and New York City, Man of My Time tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who after decades of ambivalent work as an interrogator with the Iranian regime, travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father, whose dying wish was to be buried in Iran. This is a novel not only about family and memory but about the interdependence of captor and captive, of citizen and country. Sofer is also the author of Septembers of Shiraz, which was made into a major motion picture.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue