Daneshvar attended a British missionary school in Shiraz that enabled her to learn English at a very high level of competency at a time when it was not common, even for affluent Iranians, to do so. An important “clearing center” for the Persian Gulf slave trade, the Shiraz of Daneshvar’s childhood is most extensively memorialized in her first major novel, Savushun (1969), which is set in World War II–era Shiraz. She is currently at work on a manuscript called “Translating Race: A Cultural History of Racial Thinking in Modern Iran and the Diaspora.”īorn in 1921 in Shiraz, eight years before the formal abolition of slavery by Reza Shah in 1929, writer, intellectual, and translator Simin Daneshvar later acknowledged that many of her stories came out of her childhood.
She is the author of Burying the Beloved: Gender, Fiction and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press, 2012) and articles on topics including Iranian cinema, literature, and gender and race in the Iranian diaspora. Amy Motlagh is the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature, and an associate professor of comparative literature and Middle East/South Asia studies, at UC Davis.
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