Although seven out of sixteen stories are O. Later, without prior knowledge of story-writing technique, she wrote Atash-e Khamoush (The Quenched Fire) in 1948, at the age of twenty-seven. During her year at Iran (1941-1945), she decided to try her hand at fiction writing. The relaxed social and political environment of the forties, marked by some degree of democracy and freedom of speech, prompted Daneshvar to choose journalism as a potential career. But she soon became dissatisfied with the routine nature of this job and left Radio Tehran for a newspaper called Iran, for which she wrote articles and did translations. Eventually, her fluency in English enabled her to become assistant director of foreign news. In acute need of money, she even wrote articles on cooking. She was employed at Radio Tehran, where she wrote a series of programs entitled “The Unknown Shirazi,” for which she received scant pay. When her father, a physician, died in 1941, Daneshvar was forced to find a job, as the family’s only source of income had been her father’s salary. She entered Tehran University and majored in Persian literature. Her first article, “Winter Is Not Unlike Our Life,” was published in a local Shiraz newspaper. She began her writing career as early as 1935, when she was still an eighth-grader. Born in 1921 in Shiraz, she was educated in a missionary school and became fluent in English. Daneshvar, like most contemporary Iranian writers, came from a middle-class family.

Her masterpiece novel Savushun (Mourning for Siavash), published in 1969, is considered the climax of Persian novel writing. Her work has developed and matured since the late 1940s, and today she is known as one of Iran’s best fiction writers. Among contemporary writers of Iran, the majority of whom are men, one woman stands out: Simin Daneshvar.

Savushun by simin daneshvar