Sadegh Hedayat

(1903 - 1951)

Born in 1903 into an aristocratic family, which a few years later played a role in the Persian Constitutional Revolution, Sadegh Hedayat studied dentistry and engineering in Belgium and France before returning in 1930 to Tehran, where he published his first book of short stories, Buried Alive. Regarded as one of Iran’s greatest writers of the twentieth century, he composed plays, novels, and criticism and translated works by Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1947, struggling with depression, Hedayat wrote to a friend, “One must struggle in this cataract of shit until disgust with living suffocates us.” He committed suicide in Paris in 1951.