The recording of the talk is now made available:
This year, the UBC Persian Literature Reading Club at UBC’s Iranian and Persianate Literature, Language and Culture Program at UBC is hosting a series of panel discussions about “Otherness” in modern Persian Literature. The question is what it means to be an “Other” as a writer creating and promoting new genres other than the main body of Persian Literature or to be “Other” in depicting the experience of the minorities in the Persianate world. During the Fall, Winter, and Spring of the upcoming year, we will attend to both trends in modern Persian Literature.
The sessions are hosted by Iranian writer and critic Amir Hosseing Yazdan Bod and Dr. Hessam Dehghani from the Iranian and Persianate Literature, Language and Culture Program at UBC where they invite a writer in that specific genre. During the series they will introduce and analyze genres as varied as science-fiction, crime novels, detective stories, literature of religious, racial and ethnic minorities, and the like.
For the first session, we will have a panel discussion with Iranian novelist and science-fiction writer Zoha Kazemi about the context, definitions and limitations of “being an other” or “minority” or else an “outlier” within the body of Persian literature.
Date & Time:
Sunday, November 6, 2022
11:00am (PDT) / 9:30pm (Tehran Time)
Location: online via Zoom
Presented in Persian
Free & open to the public.
بحث و گفتگویی پیرامون نویسنده‌هایی با سلایق متفاوت
در این جلسه به چیستی ادبیات اقلیت یا دیگری و یا انواعی از ادبیات می‌پردازیم که در ادبیات معاصر فارسی کمتر بدان‌ها پرداخته شده‌است. همچنین در این میزگرد تخصصی با نویسندگان درباره‌ی علل به حاشیه رانده‌شدن این انواع در ادب معاصر، انواع، جایگاه و اهمیت آن‌ها به بحث و گفتگو خواهیم پرداخت
تاریخ جلسه:
یکشنبه ششم نوامبر ۲۰۲۲
ساعت ۱۱ صبح به وقت ونکوور؛ ۱۰:۳۰ شب به وقت تهران
Guest Speakers
Zoha Kazemi is an Iranian speculative fiction writer. She was born in 1982, in Tehran and is currently living there. She has an engineering BS and an MA in English literature. She started writing and publishing stories around twelve years ago and writes both in Farsi and English. So far, she has published 13 novels (two more novels are under publication), a short story collection, and a flash fiction collection in Iran. Her novels “Rain Born” (Austin McCauley Pub.) and “Year of the Tree” (translated by Caroline Croskery, Candle and Fog Publications) are available in English. She has won the Noofe award for the best speculative novel of the year in Iran, two times in a row for her dystopian novel “Death Industry” and her post-apocalyptic novel “Rain Born”.
Her first sci-fi novel “Pine Dead” was acknowledged in the first Noofe award. She has also written other dystopian novels like “Humanoid” and “The Juliet Syndrome” which is a best seller in Iran. Kazemi has published a three-volume novel for young adults called “The World of Lollipop People” and a fantasy novel titled “The Covering Dust”. Her latest published book is a short story collection “Time Rider” with nine speculative stories. She has two more speculative novels under publication, one for adult readers and a thriller-fantasy for YA named “The Mehrzan Gate”. Kazemi owns a bookshop in Tehran named “Rama Bookstore” which is specialized in speculative fiction where she holds many events in, like book signings, creative writing classes and story writing contests.
ضحی کاظمی متولد 1361 در تهران است. تحصیلات دانشگاهی خود را در رشته‌ی مهندسی و سپس کارشناسی ارشد زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی ادامه داده و از سال 1391 تا کنون، 15 اثر داستانی از ایشان در ایران منتشر شده است. چهارمین اثر او با عنوان «سال درخت» که در سال 1393 منتشر شد، مورد استقبال منتقدین و مخاطبان ادبیات داستانی قرار گرفت. این رمان که در سبک رئالیسم جادویی نوشته شده، با ترجمه¬ی خانم کارولین کراسکری در همان سال به انگلیسی برگردانده و در لندن منتشر شد. کاظمی از اولین نویسندگان ایران است که به صورت حرفه¬ای در ژانر علمی¬تخیلی و فانتزی دست به قلم برده و آثار متعدد و متنوعی در این ژانرها خلق کرده است. تا کنون 7 اثر بزرگسال گمانه¬زن و مجموعه رمان سه¬جلدی «دنیای آدم¬نباتی¬ها» برای گروه سنی نوجوان، از ایشان منتشر شده و دو اثر دیگر در ژانرهای فانتزی و علمی¬تخیلی در دست چاپ دارد. رمان پساآخرالزمانی «باران¬زاد» او که سال 98 منتشر شد، همزمان به انگلیسی در لندن به انتشار رسید. این رمان به عنوان برنده¬ی جایزه¬ی «نوفه» برای بهترین رمان گمانه¬زن سال انتخاب شد. همچنین، کاظمی برای رمان «رنسانس مرگ» در سال 99 برای بار دوم، برنده¬ی جایزه¬ی «نوفه» شد و رمان «کاج¬زدگی» او در اولین دوره-ی برگزاری «نوفه» در سال 97، مورد تقدیر قرار گرفت. «سندروم ژولیت» پرفروش¬ترین اثر بزرگسال کاظمی، در زیرژانر دیستوپیا با ساختار روایی کارآگاهی نوشته شده و مورد استقبال خوب مخاطب ادبیات گمانه¬زن قرار گرفته. آخرین اثر منتشر شده¬ی کاظمی، مجموعه داستان «زمان¬سوار» است که پاییز سال گذشته به بازار آمد. ضحی کاظمی در حال حاضر مدیر کتابفروشی راماست، اولین کتابفروشی تخصصی ادبیات گمانه¬زن در ایران. در دو سال و نیم فعالیت کتاب راما، کاظمی میزبان نویسندگان، مترجمین و علاقه¬مندان ادبیات گمانه¬زن بوده و مراسم متعدد و مختلف رونمایی، نقد کتاب و مسابقات داستان¬نویسی با هدف ارتقای ادبیات ژانری ایران، برگزار کرده است.
Amirhossein Yazdanbod was born in 1977 in Tehran. He studied philosophy and physics, but later changed his area to computer engineering. He started writing fiction in 2004 and his short story “For Marcia, the Dear Scoundrel” won Ghalam-e Zarrin-e Zamaneh short fiction prize in 2007. Amir’s first collection of stories, The Portrait of the Incomplete Man (Cheshmeh, 2009) won two national book prizes including “Golshiri”. His latest work Stutter (Ofoq, 2013), is a political novel that occurs in Iran, Afghanistan, and Azerbaijan. He is also a member of the PEN Canada Writers in Exile group and published essays and short stories in Canada.
امیرحسین یزدان‌بد متولد ۱۳۵۶ در تهران است. او تحصیلاتش را در فیزیک کاربردی با گرایش حالت جامد وفلسفهٔ غرب نیمه تمام رها کرد. تحصیلات اصلی او در زمینهٔ کامپیوتر و امنیت شبکه متمرکز شد. از سال ۱۳۸۴ نوشتن داستان را جدی گرفت اگرچه پیش از آن هم چند یادداشت و تک داستان از او در نشریات چاپ شده بود. مجموعه داستان «پرتره‌ی مرد ناتمام» او با اقبال بسیاری روبه‌رو شد و جوایز بنیاد هوشنگ گلشیری وگام اول را نصیب او کرد. همچنین او با همین اثر فینالیست جایزه منتقدان و نویسندگان مطبوعات شد و نامزد دریافت جایزه روزی روزگاری هم بود. یزدان‌بد به خاطر داستان کوتاه «برای مارسیای رذل عزیز» برندهٔ قلم زرین شد. چهارسال بعد او نخستین رمانش «لکنت» را از نشر افق منتشر کرد که با توجه بسیاری از جانب نشریات و روزنامه‌ها و منتقدان مواجه شده است. وی هم‌اکنون ساکن کانادا و عضو انجمن پن و حلقه‌ی نویسندگان در تبعید است و آثاری در نشریات معتبر از جمله فصلنامه‌ی تخصصی اتحادیه‌ی نویسندگان کانادا از وی منتشر شده است.
Panelist
Dr. Hessam Dehghani earned his first PhD in Linguistics from Allameh Tabātabāi University working on the “Structural analysis and Phenomenological study of Persian Literature” in 2012. He then earned another PhD in Philosophy from Boston College in 2019. Between August 2019 and December 2020, he was a post-doctoral fellow and associate researcher at Harvard Divinity School and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies where he focused his research on the formation of the Persianate identity in Persian Mystic Literature. He has presented on different aspects of Persian mystic literature regularly at Harvard University and Boston College. His latest presentation on Persian Literature at Alireza Ahmadian Lecture Series can be found here. He is also the director and founder of Persian Literature Reading Club at UBC, a public humanities initiative where the most prominent Persian writers, academics, students and the Persianate community at large come together to read about and discuss some of the most pressing human issues raised in the works of Modern Persian Literature.
Besides his research interest, he has been teaching English as a foreign language in Iran since 2000, and Persian and Arabic in North America for the past 8 years. Since 2012, he has taught Persian and Arabic and directed Persian program single-handedly at Boston College for which he received both teaching and leadership award from that institution. In 2021, Dr. Dehghani started his tenure-track position as an assistant professor of teaching Persian language and Culture at the University of British Columbia. In pedagogy, his interests lie in Content-based Instruction and Critical Heritage Language Education for which he has passed multiple CAL, ACFTL and STARTALK workshops and received several certifications from 2013 up to present. He is passionate about implementing technology in teaching Persian and creating open access interactive online textbooks. Implementing the latest findings in Critical Heritage Education and Second Language Acquisition, he and his wife, Mahtab Sirdani, devised a new method of teaching literacy to the heritage learners of Persian, they call Collaborative Storytelling (CT).
Should you have any questions, please contact Dr. Hessam Dehghani at hessam.dehghani@ubc.ca.
