Blind Owl

By: Sadeq Hedayat, Sassan Tabatabai - introduction, Sassan Tabatabai - translator

Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef, Sassan Tabatabai

A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century

Winner of the 2023 Lois Roth Persian Translation Award

A Penguin Classic

Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.

Critic reviews

“a much-needed and clear translation”
—Amir-Hussein Radjy, The New York Times

“The eerie, phantasmal Blind Owl…possesses the fully dimensional oddness of a vivid dream, which one can mine for interpretations, analyze for influences or simply submit to.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

An ominous owl

A nihilistic, psychedelic monstrosity of morbid poetic prose and fatalistic, psychological dread.

Poe, Kafka and Dazai, would would have sang him praises.

Whoa dude!

Truly dark and weird. Made me feel like I was slowly descending into the same madness the narrator was trapped in. When art actually evokes me feel what it is

Masterful Work and Great Narration

Great narrator. Trigger warning: very very dark work. I admire it's aesthetic construction, but don't know if I could listen to it again.

Excellent writing and troubling story

Excellent narration for a deeply disturbing but beautifully written story. Love the translation. Important piece of historical literature.