Reza Baraheni is an exiled Iranian novelist, poet, critic, and political activist.




Former president of PEN Canada, the often called "Iran's finest living Writer" lives in Toronto, Canada, where he used to teach at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.




He’s the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism, written in Persian and English.


His works has been translated in a dozen of languages.


Moreover, he has translated into Persian works by Shakespeare, Kundera, Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...

, Andric, and Fanon

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...

.




Winner of the Scholars-at-Risk-Program Award of the University of Toronto and Massey College, Baraheni has taught in the University of Tehran, Iran, University of Texas in Austin, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of Toronto and York University. He has also been Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, Britain, Fellow of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and Fellow of Winters College, York University.

Political life

Baraheni, along with his late friends and fellow-writers, Jalal Al-Ahmad and Gholamhossein Saedi, initiated the first steps in 1966 leading to the founding of the Writers Association of Iran in the following year. Their historical stormy meeting with the Shah’s Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveida in that year, led to an open confrontation with the Shah’s regime, placing the struggle for unhampered transmission of thought as a preliminary step towards genuine democracy on the agenda of Iran’s contemporary history. In spite of the laborious struggle of some of the most famous writers of the country to turn the Writers Association of Iran into an officially recognized human rights organization, the Shah’s government suppressed the association, intimidated many of its members, arresting and torturing some of its members, among them Baraheni, who had returned from the United States after the completion of a year-long teaching position in Texas and Utah. In 1973, he was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran. Baraheni was tortured and kept in a solitary confinement for 104 days (See God’s Shadow, Prison Poems, 1976; The Crowned Cannibals, 1977, Introduction by E.L. Doctorow).



Back in the United States a year later, Baraheni joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Howard and others at PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee, sharing at the same time, with Kay Boyle, the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. He published his prose and poetry in the Time Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the American Poetry Review...



In 1976, during his exile in the U.S., human rights organizations were alarmed that the Shah’s SAVAK agents had arrived in the U.S. with the intention of assassinating Iranian opposition leaders, among them Baraheni. With the help of the American PEN and the assistance of Ramsey Clarke, Baraheni exposed the Shah’s plot.



Baraheni returned to Iran in the company of more than thirty other intellectuals in 1979, four days after the Shah fled the country. Baraheni, who had been a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran, had no political ambitions. He joined his friends in the association, and this time the uphill struggle for democracy and the unhampered transmission of thought, in fact, the battle against repression and censorship, was with the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran.



Baraheni’s concentration was on three major themes: 1)the unhampered transmission of thought; 2)equal rights for oppressed nationalities in Iran and; 3)equal rights for women with men. In the wave of the crackdown against the intellectuals, the liberals and the left in Iran in 1981, Baraheni found himself once more in the solitary confinement, this time under the new regime. Upon his release from prison in the winter of 1982 under international pressure, he was fired on the trumped up charge of having cooperated with counter-revolutionary groups on the campus of the University of Tehran. He was not allowed to leave the country for many years.



With the death of Khomeini, senior members of the Writers Association of Iran, Baraheni among them, decided that they should revive the association. They formed the Consulting Assembly of the Writers Association of Iran, and wrote two texts of utmost importance. Baraheni was one of the three members of the Association who wrote the “Text of 134 Iranian Writers.” He was one of the “Group of Eight” who undertook the job of getting the signatures of other Iranian writers. He was also secretly assigned to send the text to his connections abroad. Baraheni translated the Text into English and sent it to the International PEN.



The second text was the re-writing of the charter of the Writers Association of Iran. Several times, Baraheni and two other senior members of the association were called by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, asking them to withdraw their signatures from the resolutions of the association, and Baraheni was told that he was a persona non grata. He knew that he had to leave the country. Baraheni made arrangements with Swedish friends to get out of Iran and travel to Sweden. With the help of Eugene Schoulgin, head of the International PEN’s “Writers in Prison Committee,” and Ron Graham, the President of PEN Canada in 1996, Baraheni sought asylum in Canada. He arrived in Canada in January 1997. He later became the President of PEN Canada (2000-2002). During his presidency, Baraheni recommended a change in the Charter of the International PEN to permit the inclusion of all kinds of literature in the charter.




He now lives in Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 where he was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

’s Centre for Comparative Literature and past president of PEN Canada from June 2001-June 2003. He was also the Hart House Review

Hart House Review

Hart House Review is a Canadian literary magazine managed by student members of Hart House at the University of Toronto and published by Coach House Press. The magazine is best known for prose, poetry, art, and photography contributed by emerging writers and artists in Canada.The inaugural issue...

's feature writer (poetry) for its 2007 edition when the magazine decided to go with a theme on exiled writers/artists.

His most famous work is The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran, which recounts his days in prison against the Shah of Iran. He also spoke against the discriminative treatment of his Azerbaijani

Azerbaijani people

The Azerbaijanis are a Turkic-speaking people living mainly in northwestern Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, as well as in the neighbourhood states, Georgia, Russia and formerly Armenia. Commonly referred to as Azeris or Azerbaijani Turks , they also live in a wider area from the Caucasus to...

 background by the Iranian intelligentsia during Mohammed Reza Shah's rule.

English

• God's shadow : prison poems (Indiana University Press, Bloomington - 1976)
• The crowned cannibals: Writings on repression in Iran (Random House, Vintage, New York - 1977, introduction by E. L. Doctorow)

Anthologies

• Approaching Literature in the 21 St Century - ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl (Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston - 2005)
• God’s Spies - ed. Alberto Manguel (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, Toronto - 1999)
• The Prison where I Live, ed. Siobhan Dowd, Forward by Joseph Brodsky (Cassell, London - 1996)

Novels

• Les saisons en enfer du jeune Ayyaz (Pauvert - Paris, 2000)
• Shéhérazade et son romancier (2ème éd.) (Fayard - Paris, 2002)
• Elias à New-York (Fayard - Paris, 2004)
• Les mystères de mon pays - vol. 1 (Fayard - Paris, 2009)
• Les mystères de mon pays - vol. 2 (Fayard - Paris, to be published 2012)

Short Stories & other Texts

• Lilith
  Lilith
  Lilith is a character in Jewish mythology, found earliest in the Babylonian Talmud, who is generally thought to be related to a class of female demons Līlīṯu in Mesopotamian texts. However, Lowell K. Handy notes, "Very little information has been found relating to the Akkadian and Babylonian view...
  
  (Fayard - Paris, 2007)
• Une femme (remue.net - Paris, 2007)
• Le poète comme prisonnier (remue.net - Paris, 2007)
• L'aveuglement exilique (remue.net - Paris, 2007)

External links

• '"Anthology of poems in Persian"'
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 1/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 2/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 3/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 4/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 5/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 6/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 7/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 8/9"
• "Adressing Butterflies : a Poetry Collection in Persian; 9/9"