Fariba Vafi

• Fariba Vafi is a contemporary Iranian novelist and short story writer from Tabriz in northwestern Iran. She began publishing short stories at a young age and released her first collection “In the Depth of the Stage” in her mid-twenties, followed by a second collection in 1999. Her debut novel “My Bird” (2002) became a landmark in contemporary Iranian literature, winning several major national prizes, including the Best Iranian Novel of the Year, the Houshang Golshiri Literary Award and the Yalda Literary Prize, and it has been translated into many languages. Vafi has since published multiple acclaimed novels and story collections, such as “Tarlan” and “Dream of Tibet”, often focusing on women’s inner lives, everyday struggles and quiet forms of resistance in modern Iran. In 2017, she received Germany’s LiBeraturpreis for the German translation of “Tarlan”, and today she is regarded as one of the most important female voices in Iranian literature.