Iranian writer and poet Réza Baraheni, a great name in Persian literature victim of censorship in his country, died at the age of 86 in Canada, where he had lived in exile for years, Iranian media announced on Friday.
Born in 1935 into a modest Turkish-speaking family, in Tabriz, in the north-west of Iran, Baraheni’s prolific work includes novels, poems, but also literary criticism and theoretical essays.
Holder of a doctorate in English literature from the University of Istanbul, the writer also taught at the University of Tehran from 1964 to 1982.
He was one of the founders in 1968 of the Iranian Writers’ Association, fighting against censorship under the Shah’s regime.
A few years later, he wrote “The seasons in hell of young Ayyâz”, a novel in which he tells the story of the forbidden love between the Iranian king Mahmoud of Ghazni and his slave Ayyâz.
Censored by the monarchy because of its content deemed “immoral”, this work by Baraheni reflects the provocative novels of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade.
The novel, which was never published in Iran, was translated and published in 2000 in France.
The dissident writer was arrested in 1973 and detained for three months by the Shah’s secret service for protesting against censorship.
Banned from teaching, after the Islamic Revolution he organized writing workshops and literature courses in the basement of his house.
From the end of the 1990s, he had to go into exile with his family in Canada, where he taught comparative literature at the University of Toronto.
In recent years, several of his novels have been translated into French, including “Schéhérazade et son romancier: ou l’Auschwitz deprived du Dr Charifi” as well as “Elias à New York”.