Not applicable: Amir Hassan Cheheltan

Covid Update: The event with Amir Hassen Cheheltan in the context of the 6th Heidelberg Literary Autumn must unfortunately be cancelled.

Every Thursday eight guests came to Cheheltan’s parents’ house to talk about literature. They preferably talked about classical Persian literature: Rumi, Hafis, Saadi and others. For years these meetings opened a space of language, poetry and interpretation.
They connected the participants, but also entangled them with each other, because the state power reigned up to their circles: in the 1960s the Shah with his apparatus of repression, since the Islamic revolution in 1979 the mullahs.

Amir Hassan Cheheltan returns time and again to these conversations, including the role of his parents, the impulses for his own reading and the impact of literature. For literature is wiser, more comical, more subversive and sexually far more permissive than the official moral teachings would tolerate.

In the book, Cheheltan processes his own family history; contrasting his retreat into literature with his own intellectual emancipation. – “A monument to the liberating power of literature.” (DLF)

Amir Hassan Cheheltan, born 1956 in Tehran, studied electrical engineering in England, took part in the Iraq war and published novels and stories in Tehran. He writes for the FAZ, the SZ and the ZEIT, among others. He and his family stayed in Italy for two years because of the threat of the regime. His novels may no longer be published in Iran.

languages: German/Persian