Hamid Sadr

Hamid Sadr ( Persian حميد صدر; * December 12, 1946 in Tehran , Iran) is an Iranian-Austrian writer.

Life

Hamid Sadr started writing as a high school student. After the publication of several short stories, his first book, "The Tales of the Alley", appeared in 1966. His second book, "The Tales of the Tired Doves", was published in 1967, after which he became a member of the newly founded writers' association in Iran. While doing military service in southern Iran, he wrote his first novel “Strike of the Moths”, which only appeared (1969) when he was studying chemistry in Austria. With the ban on the writers' association in Iran, he took on the task of becoming the association's foreign correspondent for its legalization. His political exile actually began with activity in the Iranian student movement and the opposition Mossadegh movement abroad.

The publication of the novella “The Cork on the Water” and the continuation of his first novel was made difficult by the general tightening of censorship measures. When, shortly before the Islamic revolution, a complete edition was planned to be published by the renowned publisher “Amirkabir”, this publisher was confiscated by the Islamic revolutionary guards and the complete edition could no longer be published.

In 1979, after the suppression of the women's movement, the ban on secular newspapers and all non-Islamic parties, and the bloody cleansing of the state from secular forces, he was one of the few opposition members who refused to go home to join the Shah's regime. He moved from Vienna to Paris, which had become the center of the new opposition, and became a member of the Council of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, founded by Shapur Bakhtiar (the last Iranian prime minister before Khomeiny came to power). At the same time he worked with the filmmaker Jacques Bral ("Exterieur Nuit" [Cannes 1980], "Polar" and "Mauvais Garcon") and Samuel Fuller ("Street of no Return").

After Shapur Bakhtiar's murder in Paris by agents of the Islamic Republic (1991), Sadr returned to Vienna and began to write in German. The first novel written in German, “Conversation Slips to Dora” about Franz Kafka's last months , was published in 1994. The success of this work encouraged him to write the second novel, which was published in 2005 by Deuticke Verlag under the title “The Memory Secretary”. The cycle “adopted home” was concluded in 2009 with a third novel “The Bird Collector of Auschwitz”. The fourth novel by Hamid Sadr (Work in Progress) is a novel about his homeland Persia and has the provisional title "Der Sehnsuchtmacher".

plant

Persian:

• The stories of the alley 1966
• The stories of the tired pigeons 1967
• Moth strike (part 1) - 1969 (novel)
• Cork on the water 1975 (novella)
• Moth strike 1975–1979 (part 2 novel)
• In the mirror of 37 days 1983
• Quiet dog! Calm! 1984
• The 1996 letter
• Zabān-i dilʹafsurdagān 2007

German:

• Conversation slip to Dora 1994 (novel)
• The memory secretary (first chapter in the anthology Querlandsein) 1995
• The Secretary of Memory (The third chapter of the same novel in the anthology The Stranger in Me) 1999
• The memory secretary (the fourth chapter in the anthology Grenzgänger) 2002
• Fahrrad, in the anthology Kleine Fibel des Everytags 2002
• The Memory Secretary (The Whole Novel) 2005
• Draft of a letter to ... in the anthology Ungefragt 2005
• Yesterday? in the anthology The Fantasy and Power 2006
• The bird collector from Auschwitz 2009
• The curse of the greengrocer Mohamed Bouazizi 2011

Translations

From the Persian

• The story of the alley (into German) 1975
• The story of the tired pigeon (into German) 1990
• The 2007 letter

From the German

• Conversation slip to Dora (in Czech) Title: Lístky Doře. 2000
• Conversation slip to Dora (in Persian) Title: Yaddashthaii baraye Dora 2003

Articles, essays (German)

• Information about the ten-year existence of a not yet legalized writers' association in Iran (student union, Graz) 1978
• Not like that, Hans Magnus! (Feuilleton in Arbeiterzeitung) 1991
• No clash of cultures (Handelsblatt) 2006
• (Hitler) dreams of a religious fanatic? (Guest comment in Die Presse) 2007
• The curse of the greengrocer Mohamed Bouazizi: Democracy or the rule of Islam? Picus Verlag, Vienna 2011 (= lecture in the Vienna City Hall on March 8, 2011 and Vienna lectures in the City Hall; vol. 158) ISBN 978-3-85452-558-5 .

Awards, prizes, grants

• Book of the year (Iran) 1967
• State scholarship for literature Austria 1996, 1999, 2000 and 2007/08
• Work grant from the Federal Chancellery in 1997
• 2. Literature Prize for Writing Between Cultures 2001
• Bruno Kreisky Prize 2005
• Canetti Scholarship 2006

Web links

• Literature by and about Hamid Sadr in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://www.hamidsadr.com