Reza Shirmarz

Reza Shirmarz, is a Greece-based Iranian published, and awarded playwright, translator, researcher, theatre director and essayist with more than 40 books published both written and translated by him, who has been collaborating with major publishing companies, theaters, drama schools, radio channels, journals, etc. in Iran.

Reza Shirmarz was elected as a member of the board of directors of Iran's Playwrights Guild for 3 ongoing years.

He has also been a professional member of bodies such as Iran's Playwrights Guild, PEN America, and Dramatists Guild of America.

He also is a language specialist and a full member of Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) in London.

Reza Shirmarz was born in Khoy and raised in Tehran, the capital city of Iran.

His father was a ground forces general with no interest in art and his mother an art lover who taught him both discipline and love.

Shirmarz is bilingual, speaking Persian and Turkish since childhood.

He is left-handed.

Shirmarz has been influenced by great modern and classic writers and thinkers since his childhood.

He began to read Persian classic literature, especially Rumi, when he was a teen.

He also was quite fascinated by modern short stories, particularly the works of great modern Iranian writer, Sadegh Hedayat.

He began to read the non-Persian literature intensively after a couple of years.

This was the first step for him to get familiar with western literature.

Later, Shirmarz began to read more ancient and modern dramas, strengthening his creative imagination.

Such an intensive reading assisted him in his playwriting and translation career in the coming years.

He said once: "Reading and translation were like workshops I attended to learn how to create drama."

Poetry is another branch of literature that the Iranian author and artist have pursued throughout his life.

In addition to Iranian classic and modern poets, Shirmarz attempted to go meticulously through eastern and western poetry.

In the coming years he wrote a book on modern English poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats.

Reza Shirmarz wrote several plays of which two -Cinnamon Stars and Crystal Vines- were celebrated on a national scale in Fajr International Theater Festival and Iran's National Playwriting Contest.

He also translated tens of plays and books by famous world dramatists and authors, including Aristophanes (11 plays), Menanderus (1 play), Plautus (20 plays), Terentius (2 plays), George Bernard Shaw (7 plays), Edward Bond (1 play), Somerset Maugham (5 plays), Terence Rattigan (2 plays), Clifford Odets (2 plays), Iakovos Kambanellis (6 plays), John Mortimer (5 plays), Arthur Watkyns & J.A. Ferguson, Edward Albee, Marjorie Bolton, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, etc. He mostly specialized in theater and philosophy.

Shirmarz was also active in the administrative part of Fajr International Theater Festival for three years at the time of reformist Iranian president Mohammad Khatami from 2001 to 2004.

Reza Shirmarz translated two essays on African rituals and their theatrical aspects, which were published as parts of a book called Drama and Religion published in Fajr International Theater Festival by Iran's Performing arts center in 2007.

He has also been active in various Iranian radio channels as writer, translator and narrator for more than a decade.

Shirmarz has adapted and translated more than 100 dramatic works to be performed in radio and has been active as a theater critic for several years.

He received a scholarship from the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the effort and assistance of Konstantinos Passalis, the cultural deputy of the Greek embassy in Iran in 2009.

Despite all his artistic efforts in Iranian mainstream theater and media, he and his colleagues were deprived of their activities at the time of Mahmood Ahmadinezhad, the extremely fundamentalist Iranian president who was elected in year 2009.

Reza Shirmarz moved to Greece in 2010 to carry out research on ancient Greek culture and civilization, learn Greek language while studying at the university of Athens and translate Greek theatrical and philosophical works into Persian directly from Greek.

Six plays of Iakovos Kambanellis were the first series of theatrical works he translated directly from the Greek language into Persian.

His last book on Robert Wilson, a well-known American theater director, was published in 2015 by Ghatreh publishing company in Tehran.

He has been translating the complete works of Aristotle into Persian language of which the first volume (The Poetics) was published in 2017.

One of his recent translations from Greek into Persian was Aristotle's Poetics which was published in 2018 in Tehran by a major publishing company called Ghoghnoos.

Although some of his works were already published at the time of President Mohammad Khatami, they have been constantly censored and banned by the Iranian official authorities since the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, but he never gave up creating new pieces of art and translating drama and philosophy into Persian.

More than six of his works, such as Cinnamon Stars, Crystal Vines, Deep Blue Sea, Yellow Snow Falls, etc. are officially announced as forbidden to be published and distributed.

One of his translations is The Big knife by Clifford Odets, which has been prohibited for more than a decade.

The book was sold out in a short time and was republished in 2020.

Reza Shirmarz announced in one of his recent interviews that he is translating the eight books of Aristotle into Persian at the moment, along with other projects he is carrying out.

He said that Rhetoric is going to be published soon by a major Iranian publishing company called Ghoghnoos.

In addition to his research and translation activities, Shirmarz wrote several plays, such as Immigrants, The Corners of Death, The Pipe, Tsunami, etc., in English while living in Greece.

His play Immigrants was translated into Greece two years ago.