ISBN: 9780143136583

Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books, 2022
Language: English

Blind Owl, Sadeq Hedayat’s masterpiece, tells the story of a young pen-case painter and his heartbreak. Isolated and alone, he mourns the loss of a mysterious love while descending into recollections and dreams frosted over by opium and alcohol, and imbued with the images he paints: an old man, a cypress tree, a beautiful woman, a waterlily. In stark, lyrical terms, the puzzle of the pen-case painter’s grief is slowly unveiled …

As inscrutable as it is universal, Blind Owl is the seminal work of Persian modernism, and one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Sadegh Hedayat (1903 – 1951) was an Iranian writer and translator. Born in Tehran to an aristocratic Iranian family, Hedayat – after a brief period studying in France – became a devotee of Western literature and an exponent of Iranian folklore and history. He is credited with introducing many modern European writers to Iran, translating works from now-seminal authors such as Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov and Jean-Paul Sartre. His novel Blind Owl is considered to be the earliest modernist work written in Persian and one of the great Iranian novels of twentieth century. He later returned to France, where, in 1951, he died by suicide.