Sanaz Fotouhi is a writer, filmmaker, arts manager, thinker and a mom. She was born in Iran soon after the revolution and at the onset of the war. Thanks to her father’s job (though she wasn’t really thankful for it when she was a teenager) she grew up across Asia, and America before moving to Australia.

While living in Hong Kong, Sanaz studied a BA and an MPhil in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong. She particularly had a passion for creative writing and literary theory and criticism, especially modernism, post-colonial and post-modern literatures and theories. She was a passionate nerd who spent every break in the library, and handing in assignments weeks in advance, to the annoyance of her classmates! Her MPhil project (to which one day she will return in the future…) is a comparative study of the short stories of Nadine Gordimer and Katherine Mansfield.

It was this passion that led her to her PhD study of Iranian writing in English from a post-colonial perspective where she examined every text of fiction and memoir that she could get her hands on by Iranian writers in English since 1979 to 2014. This study eventuated as a book, The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora: Meaning and Identity Since the Islamic Revolution which has become a seminal text that examines the body of Iranian writing in English between that time.