زمستان ۶۲ <> Zemestan-e 62

Famous storywriter, Esmail Fasih, was born in Tehran in 1934 in an extended family. He stepped into the literary world at an early age with the stories one of her sisters read to him. He finished primary school concurrent with the onset of the World War II. After graduating from high school, he traveled to Turkey, France and US. There he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Montana University. He went to stay in San Francisco where he married a European girl. After a year, he returned to Montana to receive a BA in English literature from the same university. The small city of Missoula used to be the hub of American authors and it was there where he met with renowned author Earnest Hemingway. After spending a year in Washington DC, and the tragedy of the death of his wife, Fasih returned to Tehran. There, he got to know renowned authors of the time and started translating a few books. In 1963, he went to Ahvaz to work at the art school of the National Iranian Oil Company. Fasih started writing short stories in those years of solitude and sadness. His first novel ’The Raw Wine’ was published in 1968. He then was sent on a research mission to the US where he studied at the Michigan University to obtain a master’s degree in English literature. After returning home, he started working for the Abadan Oil University. His next two novels ’Familiar Soil’ and ’The Blind Heart’ were published within three years. His next work–a collection of four short stories titled ’Birth, Love, Marriage, Death’–came out in 1972 and another collection named ’Meeting in India’ was printed two years later. His everlasting novel ’The Story of Javid’–based on Zoroastrian themes–was published after six years of research and editing in 1979. After the Islamic Revolution, he wrote the novel ’The Tulip Rose’. He wrote ’Sorayya in Coma’ in 1983 which was warmly welcomed by Iranians inside the country and abroad. English, French and German translations of the book were also high in demand overseas. Other stories penned by him include ’The 1983 Winter’, ’A Letter to the World’, ’Forouhar’s Escape’, ’Shahbaz and Joghdan’ and ’The Pain of Siavash’. In 1994, he wrote the mystic novel ’The Ancient Wine’ which was rather astonishing to readers of his previous works. Fasih has translated an anthology of short stories by famous authors, as well as works by Thomas A. Harris and Eric Bern. He has also translated books on psychology and behavioral sciences. Most of his stories have been inspired by or linked to the people he met or the events he went through. Deaths, wars and revolutions are recurrent motifs in his works.