The Blind Owl (1936; Persian: بوف کور, Boof-e koor, listenⓘ) is Sadegh Hedayat's magnum opus and a major literary work of 20th-century Iran.
Written in Persian, it is narrated by an unnamed pen case painter, who addresses his murderous confessions to a shadow on his wall that resembles an owl.
His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.
[1] The novel tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, who, while in despair after losing a mysterious lover, addresses his morbid confessions to a shadow on his wall that looks like an owl.
In 2023 a book was published in Tehran by Deed (Sight) press titled Around the World in Eighty Five Years by Jahangir Hedayat and Farzad Shahrusvand, young translator of The Blind Owl, in which they described exactly the whole presses of translations of the novella in 50 languages and also a lot of information about books, films, plays and paintings created under influence of the Blind Owl all over the world.