Iran: My Grandfather

A vanished, tattered black and white photograph, taken in Tehran in 1946. The image of a sombre and inscrutable middle-aged man called Salman Fuladvand, a lieutenant and controversial police chief under Iran’s second last king. It is the memory of this photograph that begins Ali Alizadeh’s story of his grandfather Salman’s life, spanning Salman’s youthful devotion to the advancement of his country and the emancipation of Iranian women, his conflicts with the shahs, his wrongful imprisonment, and his eventual embracing of Sufi mysticism. Iran: My Grandfather is a rare mix of narrative, memoir, history and personal exploration. It recounts Iran’s journey from progressive idealism to the ravages of tyranny, imperialism and religious reaction. It is a testament to the mistakes of the past and the present, an examination of family and identity, and an interrogation of the meaning of home and belonging. As Alizadeh writes, this story is ‘a thread to show the path out of the labyrinths’.

‘Iran, My Grandfather is a work of recovery, resistance, and affirmation. I think one can say without risk of hyperbole that it is one of the most remarkable texts ever to have been published in Australia.’ John Kinsella

Ali Alizadeh is a novelist, poet and translator. His first novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008) was chosen as The Age newspaper’s Fiction Pick of the Week in July 2008, and was described as a “harrowing but brilliant debut novel” in The Sunday Tasmanian and “an important novel” in The Sydney Morning Herald. Ali’s poetry has been included in anthologies such as The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009), The Best Australian Poetry 2009 and The Best Australian Poems 2008. His most recent collection of poetry, Eyes in Times of War, was published by Salt Publishing in 2006. Ali’s translations of poetry from Persian to English include the classical Sufi odes translated with Kenneth Avery in Fifty Poems of Attar (2007) .

Ali was born in 1976 in Tehran and immigrated to Australia in the early 1990s after experiencing the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. After completing high school in Brisbane and a BA at Griffith University, Gold Coast, he moved to Melbourne where he received his PhD in writing from Deakin University. He has worked as street performer, researcher, proofreader, and has taught writing and literature at universities in Australia, China, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. He lives with his wife Penelope and son Jasper.