Ghol膩m-Hossein S膩'edi was born in Tabriz 5 January 1936. In 1963 he graduated from University of Tabriz in medicine, began his writing career (under the pen name Gowhar-e Mor膩d) with short stories and plays (1966). S膩'edi was a noted writer, editor, and dramatist; an influential figure in popularizing the theater as an art form, as well as a medium of political and social expression in contemporary Iran. Later, after completing the mandatory military service he embarked (1963) on a five-year internship to specialize in psychiatry. He was repeatedly investigated, arrested, and incarcerated by the security police (SAVAK) and subjected to both physical and psychological abuse. Sa鈥檈di鈥檚 plays were at first produced and viewed by small groups of university students as 鈥檛heatrical experiments,鈥� and attracted wide audiences. The dialogues are designed to lend themselves to modification by local accents and dialects, a quality that has made the plays accessible and appealing to audiences of different ethnicity and varying levels of intellectual sophistication. By the end of the 1960s Sa鈥檈di鈥檚 standing as a prolific dramatist and fiction writer had been well established in the circle of literary figures. Based on his travels in 1965 to the villages and tribal areas of the Persian Gulf and in 1968 to Azerbaijan in northern Iran, Sa鈥檈di produced a series of monographs with anthropological underpinnings. The importance of these studies is that in a variety of ways they became useful sources for many of Sa鈥檈di鈥檚 later works. In Sa鈥檈di鈥檚 monographic sketches and fictional narratives the village and the city are both inhabited by the same anxiety-ridden people, tormented by the same problems. By the early 1970s, in addition to his short stories, he had published a short novel, Tup (The Cannon, 1970) and completed the manuscripts of T膩t膩r-e Khand膩n (The Grinning Tartar) while he was in prison for
I was 11 or 12 when I found this book with its paper worn out in my father's forgotten collection. I started reading, like a 12-years-old starts and went through it in less than one day. Today, as a 27er I can still remember the dimly lit room where those people gathered. And I still hear the thunder exploding. And I still feel how much I had loved the book.