Simin Daneshvar was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1921, and educated at a bilingual English-Persian school. She completed her education at Tehran University, from which she received a PhD in 1949. She is the author of three published novels and five collections of short stories. Her first novel, Savushun, published in 1969, soon became the all-time best-selling novel in Iran and has been translated into English and a dozen other languages. Many of her short stories have also been translated into English. In addition to writing, Daneshvar taught art history at Tehran University from 1959 to 1979. While many writers of her generation left Iran after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Daneshvar continued to live, write, and publish in Tehran until her death in 2012.

Patricia J. Higgins studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, from which she received a BA, MA, and PhD. She conducted eighteen months of dissertation research in Tehran and later spent ten months as a Fulbright Lecturer at Tehran University. Her work has been published in several journals, as chapters in edited volumes, and as contributions to encyclopedias. She is the co-translator of Ali Shabani’s The Thousand Families (2018) and Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Hafez in Love (2021), and a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022). At SUNY Plattsburgh, she rose through the ranks as a faculty member to university distinguished service professor of anthropology and served as associate vice president and then interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is an instructional professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Ottawa in 2012 and a PhD in applied linguistics with a focus on translation from Tehran Azad University in 2004. She has published books, book chapters, and articles on linguistics as well as translation and Persian language pedagogy. She is also the co-translator of Ali Shabani’s The Thousand Families (2018), Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Hafez in Love (2021), and Sohrab Sepehri’s The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (2021). She is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian (2020) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018) and The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022).