Born in Tehran a month after the coup in 1953, Fereshteh Molavi was raised and worked there as a writer, editor, translator, and research librarian until 1998.

[1] In 1987 she won the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO Scholarship Award (Tokyo) for her translations, but she was barred from leaving the country by the Harasat (Intelligence Agency) office of the Ministry of Higher Education.

After ceasefire in 1988, she published her first novel, Khaneh-ye abr-o-bad (The House of Cloud and the Wind);[3] her first collection of short stories, Pari Aftabi (The Sun Fairy); and two other fiction works, The Orange and the Bergamot and The Persian Garden.

The Orange and the Bergamot was admired by the Children’s Book Council (Tehran, 1993) and nominated for «Les prix graphiques», Octogonales du CIELJ (Centre International d’Etudes en Littérature de Jeunesse, Paris, 1994).

Listen to the Reed, a chapbook based on her dialogue with the Canadian award-winning writer Karen Connelly, was published by PEN Canada in 2005.