Masoud Ghadim Fallah

Iranian author and sociologist of literature Masoud Ghadim Fallah published his first collection of stories at the age of sixteen. Two years later, in 2009, he began studying sociology at the University of Tehran. The authorities quickly opened their eyes to his political and social activities, and after completing his bachelor's degree, they banned him from continuing his studies.

Instead, Fallah began private studies of the works of the Russian author Leon Tolstoy. These resulted in two books published in 2017: Tolstoy, Freud, Elias and Tolstoy and Schopenhauer. He also wrote several plays and two novels that could not be published or staged as a result of censorship, and made seven short films and one feature film, all of which were banned due to anti-religious content.

Fallah has also written several plays over the years, but has been prevented from both publishing and performing them due to the political content. The same goes for the two novels Return and Man Sits to End. Both works banned by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and not published. He has also made seven short films and one feature film that have been censored and banned.

From 2019, Masoud Ghadim Fallah led a think tank in Tehran called the Athens Institute, for feminist and Marxist studies and reading of authors such as Marx and Engels, Ibsen, Camus and Sartre. The government reprimanded Fallah and the other founders of the institute, and shut down the institute after raids by the security forces.

After these events, he started a major project of writing a three-volume historical novel about important events in Iran over the past 20 years. He published the first volume as a digital underground book in June 2021. It deals with the student uprising in the dormitory of the University of Tehran in 1999 and the events in 2008 that led to the so-called Persian Spring and the emergence of Iran's green movement.

Masoud Ghadim Fallah came to Skien in November 2020 together with his wife Nasim Nazari. Both are today the city's ICORN writers. Nazari is also a writer and sociologist of literature, and together they recently completed the manuscript for a systematic review in Persian of Henrik Ibsen's plays, their conceptual basis and underlying critique of political economy.