When she was twenty-six, Vafi married Majid Rahbar-e Azadi. Her first child, a son named Elshan, was born a year later in 1990, followed four years later by a girl, Elyar. Although “[m]arriage and children delayed her plan to become a novelist,” as she told Nazila Fathi of the New York Times,8 Vafi never relinquished the dream of becoming a writer. Unlike several influential women writers—Parvin E’tessami, Goli Taraqi, Simin Daneshvar, Simin Behbahani, Forugh Farrokhzad—she was neither related to nor connected with prominent writers. To seek comments by a professional writer, she found the home address of Jamal Mir-Sadeqi (1933–), a prolific writer and teacher of fiction.9 One day after the publication of her first collection of short stories, she knocked on his door with samples of her writing. With tenacity and resolve, she traveled by bus to Tehran every other month, accompanied by her children, to show him her work.

Vafi entered the literary scene in 1988 with a short story, “You’re at Peace Now, Father,” published in the journal Adineh.10 Although she continued to publish her short stories in literary journals such as Doniya-ye Sokhan and Chista, it took her eight years to publish her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dar Omq-e-sahneh (In the Depth of the Stage, 1996).11 In an outburst of creativity since then, she has published two other short-story collections—Hatta vaqti mikhandim (Even When We Laugh, 1999) and Dar rah-e villa (On the Way to the Villa, 2008)—plus four novels: Parandehye man (My Bird, 2003); Tarlan (2004); Rowyay-e-tabbat (Dream of Tibet, 2005); and Razi dar kucheha (A Secret in the Alleys, 2008).12 Currently, she lives with her family in Tehran and is working on a new novel and a book for children and young adults, titled Stories from Parvin E’tessami. The latter is a prose rendition of forty poems by E’tessami, a pioneering woman poet celebrated for her versified stories.13

Vafi’s first novel, My Bird, took the Iranian literary scene by surprise. It won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Yalda Literary Prize, the Esfahan Prize, and the Golshiri Prize, and was chosen as Iran’s best novel of the year in 2003. Containing fifty-three short, relatively self-contained chapters, the novel reads like poetry. The author, a master of verbal economy, weaves magic with words and creates her own signature style—minimalist, dazzling in its candor and courage, attentive to the smallest details, textured, empathetic, simple and revelatory, elegant and profound. She offers competing visions of truth, avoids judgment and absolutist pronouncements, and shows that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin.