Amir Cheheltan was born in 1956 in Tehran and has published eight novels, five volumes of short stories and a screenplay. Due to censorship, his first novel, The Mourning of Qassem, was only published in 2003, twenty years after it was written, and many of his novels have had to undergo revisions. Cheheltan supervises the creative writing workshop at the Karnameh Culture Centre in Tehran, and writes feature articles for international papers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine and Süddeutsche Zeitung.