Mandanipour, Shahriar

Shahriar Mandanipour is an exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction includes two novels – Moon Brow and Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in English – and the story collection Seasons of Purgatory (Bellevue Literary Press). In 2006, Mandanipour moved to the United States, where in 2021, he became a citizen. In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from various perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.