Aliyeh Ataei

Aliyeh Ataei is an Iranian-Afghan author and screenwriter whose books have won major literary awards in Iran, including Mehregan-e-Adab for Best Novel. Ataei was born in 1981 in Iran and grew up in Darmian, a border region between the South Khorasan Province of Iran and the Farah province of Afghanistan. Part of her family lives in Iran, another in Afghanistan. A women’s rights activist, Ataei is deeply influenced by her observations and experiences growing up as a female member of a minority in Iran, and her writing is dedicated to themes of identity and immigration. She graduated from high-school in Birjand and went to Tehran to continue her studies in Tehran University of Art where she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in screenplay writing. Her short stories have also been translated and published in several American and French magazines such as the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, and Guernica. Ataei’s collection of personal essays, Kursorkhi in Persian, was published by Gallimard in April 2023 as La frontière des oubliés.