Ṣādiq Hidāyat was born in Tehran on 17 February 1903 and died in Paris on 9 April 1951. He is the author of The blind owl , the most famous Persian novel in Europe and America as well as in Iran. Many of his short stories are in a critical realist style and are regarded as amongst the best written in twentieth-century Iran. His most original contribution, however, was the use of modernist, more often surrealist, techniques in Persian fiction. He was thus not only a great writer but also