Born in Tehran a month after the coup in 1953, she was raised and worked there as a writer, editor, translator, and research librarian until 1998. While in Iran, unable to publish some of her works due to censorship and war, she compiled a comprehensive bibliography of short stories in Persian. She also translated numerous works by internationally-known writers, including Juan Rulfo and Arnold Hauser. In 1987 she won the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO Scholarship Award (Tokyo) for her translations, but she was barred from leaving the country by the Harasat (Intelligence Agency) office of the Ministry of Higher Education. A year later, she won the Best Translation Award (The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, Tehran). After ceasefire in 1988, she published her first novel, Khaneh-ye abr-o-bad (The House of Cloud and the Wind); her first collection of short stories, Pari Aftabi (The Sun Fairy); and two other fiction works, The Orange and the Lime and The Persian Garden. The Orange and the Lime was admired by the Children’s Book Council (Tehran, 1993) and nominated for « Les prix graphiques », Octogonales du CIELJ (Centre International d’Etudes en Littérature de Jeunesse, Paris, 1994).