Sadegh Hedayat

Hedayat came from an aristocratic Tehran family and studied engineering and dentistry in Belgium and France before abandoning both for literature, immersing himself in Kafka, Poe, and Rilke and translating some of the first Kafka into Persian. He returned to Iran to work as a low-level civil servant, chafing against censorship under Reza Shah's government and a literary culture he found provincial.

The Blind Owl (1937), his masterpiece, was initially banned in Iran and circulated privately before finding an audience; its narrator confesses obsession and murder in a hallucinatory, opium-thick voice addressed to a shadow shaped like an owl, collapsing chronology and identity into recurring nightmare. It remains the single most translated and discussed work of modern Persian fiction.

Deeply pessimistic and increasingly isolated, Hedayat traveled to Paris in 1951 and took his own life there that same year, sealing his apartment and destroying unpublished manuscripts before he died.