Lived in Real Time

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Meet two writers who have arrived at the personal essay form via different avenues. Sara Mokhavat, an actress and filmmaker has written about how it is to be a working woman - particularly in the arts - in Iran. Vali Khalili, a once traditional journalist who, because of the vagaries of living in an authoritarian state has turned more to the craft of essay writing in order to understand the lives of youth and women in his country - but even more importantly, in order to convey what it means to be a man in Iran after the Woman Life Freedom movement. Together these writers and their translator, Salar Abdoh, will discuss the arc of their various careers as they unfold in real time inside Iran rather than the usual reductive narratives generally available from both liberal and reactionary media when discussing the complex and diverse social milieu of Iran.

This event is part of the Against the Grain: Gender and the Fraught Politics of Translation in Persophone World series. These spring events are themed, "In Their Own Words: Iranian Lives and the Personal Essay."

Speakers

is a graduate in Film Studies and Directing from the College of Cinema & Theater in Tehran. For her feature film effort in The Guns of Nane Kardar, she was a finalist as Best Female Role in the 2011 Fajr International Film Festival. Her novel, A Woman Who was Found in the Lost & Found, was published in 2017 and her play, Goodbye My Cherry Orchard, was staged in 2018. Her first short film, Shogun, was made in 2019 and her second film, Private, was shown at the 2021 Chicago International Film Festival and also won the Directors Beyond Borders prize at the Discover Film festival in London. Her latest efforts are Lovebirds, 2023, and Home, 2024. She is also a writer of personal essays concerning women’s lives in Iran that have been published recently in the international magazine of arts & literature, The Markaz Review.

Vali Khalili is currently the managing editor of the economic magazine, Ayandeh Negar and a reporter for Tragedy magazine in Iran. He studied Communications & Journalism at the Azad University of Tehran and ever since has held positions at some of the most important journals and newspapers in Iran, including Shargh Daily, Etemad and Hamshahri. He is a co-writer of the volume, Without Smoke, Fire and Blood (2021), dealing with America’s unprecedented economic sanctions on Iran, and his reporting and essays have appeared in such international venues as The Atlantic, The Markaz Review and Asymptote. He has also twice been nominated for the prestigious True Story international award in Switzerland and once for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the short story, “Fear is the Best Keeper of Secrets” in the collection, Tehran Noir. Two anonymously written essays have also been published in the collection, Woman Life Freedom (London, 2023). He lives and works in Tehran.

was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the editor of Tehran Noir and author of the several novels, most recently Out of Mesopotamia, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2020, and A Nearby Country Called Love, just released in paperback by Penguin and called “a complex portrait of interpersonal relationships in contemporary Iran” by the New York Times and “brutally poignant” by the Washington Post. A prolific essayist and translator as well, Abdoh teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.

was born in Iran and is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas just before the dominance of modern European colonial power. She is the author of Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, 2020), which was translated into Persian last year. She is a 2024-2025 Heyman Center Fellow.

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Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities