Shida Bazyar on memory, migration, and 'The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran'

The cup of tea is nearly cold when Shida Bazyar sits down in her study. There will be others; coffee, then tea again, the cups trading places beside the books all morning. Outside, something luminous is happening to the trees. “Spring is here, everything is beautiful, but it all feels strange. I can only think of the people in Iran who can’t enjoy the spring, who couldn’t enjoy the New Year,” says the Berlin-based author whose novel, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, has just been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

The nights are quiet in Tehran is a sentence that the world has since made literal. “The title was never meant to be true,” Bazyar says, because in reality, Tehran is too large, too restless for quiet even at night. The line is plucked from the perspective of Laleh, one of the novel’s four narrators, who knows night as the hour when the house empties out, the last of the visitors gone. “It’s the only time she can think. Also, the time she can hear the rumours, the adults trade in whispers. But now, during wartime, the title has come true. People stay inside and the nights are indeed quiet. And it is really, really hurtful,” she says.

The novel traces the ripples of a revolution through one family’s life, asking, ‘How is it that you can make people stay somewhere they want to leave and make people who want to be there leave?’ Its origins can be traced back to a 10-year-old Shida and her nightly routine during her vacation in Iran where she would sit on a delicately patterned red and green rug with her diary open, diligently documenting the events of the day. “I wanted to tell my father, who couldn’t now, inside their reasons where, as the novel puts it, ‘My parents did forbidden things in a country where everything is forbidden.’ Bazyar adds: “They fought so hard. They risked a lot. It is very easy, from our point of view, to make accusations.” The distance in that sentence is real, and so is everything it is made of.

Her research began in the childhood diaries she kept on those Iran holidays, the home videos from trips she half remembers. She poured herself over these memories to find the place in herself where the writing could begin. She interviewed her parents, though parents, she says, “are never telling you everything, and that is also fine. They still want to protect you.” The historical facts, The books about the revolution, the Iranian literary canon came alongside. “That is something you can always do while you are writing, but what matters is the search inside your own curiosity for the thing that makes you want to write at all,” she articulates in English with aphoristic beauty, despite repeatedly denying her command over the language. The novel was written in German, which is the only language Bazyar writes in.

“Farsi is my first language. It is the language which is deeply connected with my emotions, but in Farsi I have a child’s vocabulary. German is the language which shaped me and I am lost without my German. There’s no language I can use like this language.” The novel was translated in English by Ruth Martin who has managed to hold all four narrator voices distinct. I ask whether it would be possible to write this book now, in the middle of what is happening in Iran. “Not this one. There are too many new crimes to account for, too many names to add, too much has shifted in the diaspora. Immediacy changes everything,” she says. “It changes the view we have on the past, how we interpret the current situation, how we judge it.”

She writes between 8am and 3pm, always in her study, never in a café, never at night although she admits a fondness for that particular cliché—the writer hunched over a corner table somewhere noisy and badly lit, where they know her order. But for Bazyar to finish her pages, the desk has to be spick and span, emails answered, invoices sent. When she’s deep in a novel, she holds herself to three pages a day. “Writing is, maybe, the smallest part of writing, the biggest part is reading, doing research, thinking, having conversations,” says the writer who can spend hours on a single sentence, whittling it down to its most perfect self.

And then, on a day like any other, at 6 pm when Bazyarhad wrapped work for the day and wasn’t expecting any news, good or bad, her publisher Scribe forwarded the email with its impossible subject line—International Booker Prize Shortlist Announced. “I was really, really surprised, obviously. For many days after that, I kept shaking my head because it was like the body was saying, ‘no, it can’t be true ’.” More so because Bazyar has always thought of this book as something intimate. At one point in the interview she calls the novel a family project. A small laugh is caught in the sentence as she explains how her mother, who is not a writer, undertook the task of translating the book in Farsi. “She was convinced that she could do it. It was so important for her, and she worked really hard on it,” she adds proudly.

 

I first heard Bazyar at the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode, where she spoke of the writer as a witness to transformation and tension, all while the sea moved in and out of the conversation like a participant. She has done these readings in many countries where the book has travelled in translation. In summer light and the first cold of autumn, each time readers are known to bring their own stories into the room and it all becomes unexpectedly emotional. There is a man Bazyar thinks about often. Old enough to be her father. I think of a line from her novel: Fathers are never young. He came up to her after one of her readings. He too had been imprisoned in Iran. In opposition, a leftist, like the characters in her novel. His daughter kept asking him to tell his story, and he stops as if the sentence itself is a place he cannot re-enter. Soon he is crying, and so is Bazyar. Everything they cannot say sounds the same. “Even if the man can’t tell his story,” she tells me, “his daughter can read this one.” And in that moment it feels as though all their stories are leaning toward each other, trying to be heard.

Photo credits: Tabea Treichel

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of Harper's Bazaar India  

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