Aramofen is the pen name of an Iranian novelist. He set his name aside so the story could travel without its author's shadow, in an age when loving Iran still carries a price.

His fiction walks the line between novel and document. The people in his stories are invented, but the ground they walk on is built from verified events of Iran's modern history, and every historical account is sourced in the footnotes. His prose runs on two currents: short sentences that land like a pulse, and the warmth of the oral storytelling of Iranian homes, threaded here and there with echoes of classical Persian literature. His lifelong subject is a single idea: truth as a trust, passed from hand to hand and from one generation to the next, to be delivered inta ...more