Faribā Vafī
Biography
Faribā Vafī was born in Tabriz in 1963 and currently lives in Berlin. She belongs to the Azerbaijani minority in Iran. As a teenager she wrote short stories that were published in literary magazines. Her first short story collection was published in 1986. Her debut novel Kellervogel became an instant bestseller in 2002, as did all of her subsequent books. Since then she has published eight novels and three collections of stories, for which she has received the country's most prestigious literary awards, including the Golschiri Prize and the Yalda Prize. In 2017 she was awarded the LiBeraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Her works have been translated into numerous languages, including German, French, English, Spanish, Turkish and Kurdish. The novels are in German translation Kellervogel (2012), Tarlan (2016) and The Dream of Tibet (2018) and the stories In the rain (2021). In 2020/21 she stayed in Berlin and Cologne as a DAAD scholarship holder.
Last Released
As in her novels, the central themes of the collection of short stories areIn the rain by the LiBeraturpreiswinner Faribā Vafī the intimate everyday experiences of women who try to go their own way independent of social restrictions.
Thanks to her fluent language, Faribā Vafī manages to create a close proximity to the characters, which is also conveyed without restriction in the congenial translation. Her stories repeatedly deal with tensions between tradition and progressiveness, between loneliness and the desire for independence. In her works, Vafī traces the complexity of human relationships, which is universal and resonates with readers beyond linguistic and social boundaries.
Translated from the Persian by Jutta Himmelreich
