Melody of a Rainy City, The Descent, The Fishermen, Death in Autumn, From behind the Glasses, The Glorious Smile of Mr. Gil, and Beneath the Saqqakhaneh Passage are among his well-known works.
Radi was born to a middle-class family and was raised in the city of Rasht, where he lived the first eleven years of his life until his father, the owner of a confectionery factory, went bankrupt.
In 1976 he started teaching playwriting in the Moʾassesa-ye morabbiyān-e omur-e honari (Institute for training art instructors) affiliated to the Ministry of Education, from which he retired in 1994.
In the following years many of Radi's works of fiction, including “Jāddeh” (The road), “Suʾ-e tafāhom” (Misunderstanding), and “Kučeh” (The alley), were published in major periodicals.
Az pošt-e šišehā, a play in four acts, tells the story of two couples, depicting the adverse conditions surrounding the lives of intellectuals, then a major issue of concern in Iran.
Jalāl Āl-e Aḥmad, however, did not concur with what he held as Radi's portrayal of the play's main character as a rowšanfekr-e pizori “false intellectual” (Asadi, 2005, p. 109).
By technical focus on spatial dynamics and staging, Radi turned his plays into a forum in which the intimate relationships of emotionally diverse individuals were displayed, and private fates mirrored societal tensions.
In 1971, he published a series of articles called “Nāmehā-ye hamšahri” (The letters from a citizen) in the literary monthly Negin, founded and edited by Maḥmud ʿEnāyat.
Radi's fascinating use of language in Dar meh beḵˇān (Sing in the mist, Tehran, 1975) highlights the splendor of Persian poetry and its mythopoetic overtones.
In Pellekān (The Stairs, 1982), Radi designs a pent, angular world on the basis of five metaphoric stairways made out of human bones on which the protagonist, ascends to fulfill his Machiavellian ambitions.
Tāngo-ye toḵm-e morq-e dāq (The tango of the hot egg, 1984), the revised version of a play which was published as Erṯieh-ye Irāni in 1968, and Āhesteh bā gol-e sorḵ (Tender with the red rose), appeared in 1984, followed by the publication of Monji dar ṣobḥ-e namnāk (The savior in a wet morning) in 1987 (Figure 4).
In his historical play Bāḡ-e šabnamā-ye mā (Our shining garden, Tehran, 1999), Radi exposes the dictatorial nature of the government in the guise of a semi-documentary, and incarnates the concept of unrestrained political power in the grotesque figure of a king who repeatedly contradicts himself.
Melodi-e šahr-e bārāni (The melody of the rainy city), and a series of articles called Ensān-e riḵteh (The broken man), as well as Ḵānumeh o mahtābi, one of the plays most admired by Radi himself, were published from 2000 to 2003.
Radi has earned the praise of critics as “a distinguished playwright” (Šarifi, P. 673–74) and a writer whose incorporation of colloquial Persian in his works has contributed to the preservation of the dialects of the northern provinces (Ghanoonparvar, p. 531).
In 2004, he published the plays Šab be ḵeyr Jenāb-e Kont (Good night, my count), Pāʾin-e goḏar-e Saqqā-ḵāneh (Beneath the Saqqa-khaneh passage), and Cactus.
Radi finished writing his last play, Ahanghā-ye šokolāti (Chocolate songs) amidst a year-long battle with cancer, to which he succumbed on 12 December 2007.