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Artist
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
3+ albums
iranstoryPersianwriternovel
about
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Persian: محمود دولتآبادی, Mahmud Dowlatâbâdi) (born 1 August 1940 in Dowlatabad, Sabzevar) is an Iranian writer and actor, known for his promotion of social and artistic freedom in contemporary Iran and his realist depictions of rural life, drawn from personal experience. Biography[edit] In 1940, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born to a poor shoemaker in Dowlatabad, a remote village in the Sabzevar, the northwestern part of Khorasan Province, Iran.[1] He worked as a farmhand and attended Mas'ud Salman Elementary School, where he learned to read. Books were a revelation to the young boy. "I read all the romances that we had at that time around the village," he said in an interview.[2] "I would read on the roof of the house with a lamp…I read War and Peace that way." Though his father had little formal education, he introduced Dowlatabadi to the Persian Classical poets, Saadi Shirazi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi. "[My father] generally spoke in the kind of language they used," Dowlatabadi said. Nahid Mozaffari, who edited a PEN anthology of Iranian literature, said of Dowlatabad, "He has an incredible memory of folklore, which might come from his days as an actor or might come from his origins, as somebody who didn't have a formal education, who learned things by memorizing the local poetry and hearing the local stories."[1] As a teenager, Dowlatabadi took up a trade like his father and opened a shop. One afternoon, he found himself hopelessly bored. He closed the sh