Simin Dāneshvar[3] (Persian: سیمین دانشور‎; 28 April 1921 – 8 March 2012) was an Iranian[4] academic, novelist, fiction writer, and translator.

Her books dealt with the lives of ordinary Iranians, especially those of women, and through the lens of recent political and social events in Iran at the time.

Daneshvar attended the English bilingual school, Mehr Ain and in eighth grade published her first article, "Winter Is Not Unlike Our Life," in a local newspaper.

In 1941, her third year of university, her father died, and to support herself she began writing pieces for Radio Tehran as the "Nameless Shirazi".

It was the first collection of short stories published by a woman in Iran, and as such gave her a measure of fame, but in later years Daneshvar refused to republish the work because she was embarrassed by the juvenile quality of the writing.

Her Ph.D. dissertation, "Beauty as Treated in Persian Literature," was approved in 1949 under the supervision of Professor Badiozzaman Forouzanfar.

In 1952, she traveled to the United States as a Fulbright Fellow working on creative writing at Stanford University with Wallace Stegner.

In 1961, she published "Shahri chun behesht" (A city like paradise), twelve years after her first short story collection.

[citation needed] Daneshvar continued teaching as an associate professor in the university, later becoming the chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology, from the 1970s until her retirement in 1981.

Daneshvar's most successful work, Savushun,[16][17] a novel about settled and tribal life in and around her home-town of Shiraz, was published in 1969.

They contain themes such as child theft, adultery, marriage, childbirth, sickness, death, treason, profiteering, illiteracy, ignorance, poverty and loneliness.

"[19] In Language of Sleep, a biography play which attempts to portray the lives of two great female authors, German-Romanian novelist Herta Muller and herself Simin Daneshvar was written by Mona Ahmadi.