Mandanipour: Censorship is rooted in Iranian culture

Shahriar Mandanipour is a novelist and essayist in modern Persian literature.Mandanipour was born and raised in Shiraz. In 1975 he moved to Tehran and studied Political Sciences at Tehran University, graduating in 1980. In 1981, he enlisted in the army for his military service. To experience war and to write about it, he volunteered to join the front during the Iran-Iraq war and served there as an officer for eighteen months.Following his military service, Mandanipour returned to Shiraz where he worked as director of the Hafiz Research Center and director of the National Library of Fars. In 1998, he became chief editor of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal.In 2006, Mandanipour traveled to the United States as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. In 2007 and 2008 he was a writer in residence at Harvard University and in 2009 at Boston College. In September 2011, Mandanipour returned to Brown University as a visiting professor of literary arts where he currently teaches contemporary Persian literature and modern Iranian cinema.He has recently traveled to Australia to participate in a series of writing workshops and doing lectures. In an interview with SBS Radios Persian Program, he speaks about censorship in literature and its impact on writers outside of Iran.

SBS Persian Source: SBS Persian