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Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
In the shadow of Iran's rising unrest, Azar, a young caregiver in Tehran, quietly navigates a life
suspended between duty and yearning. Haunted by memories and burdened with unspoken dreams, she longs for escape—especially to Portugal, a land of imagined freedom and forgotten songs. But Azar is not bound to just one reality. In the silence of her grief, she slips into alternate worlds: as the mournful voice of Amália Rodrigues, Portugal’s queen of Fado, and as a cloistered girl living three centuries earlier, in a Lisbon trembling before its devastating quake.
Woven with eerie beauty and lyrical melancholy, this haunting novel explores identity, exile, and the fragile line between dreams and memory. From the Deterioration of the Chrysanthemum Garden is a tale of resistance—in the face of repression, in the echo of music, and in the timelessness of sorrow.
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Ramesh Safavi
Ramesh Safavi is a Persian writer and playwright whose work drifts between the poetic and the political, the intimate and the mythic. She has published three novels and a screenplay, and her play Morkvagen 13 was awarded by Sweden’s National Theatre (Riksteatern) and performed at Chile’s Women’s Theatre Festival. Her writing explores themes of exile, identity, memory, and the many lives women live—whether in reality or in silence.
Her latest novel, From the Deterioration of the Chrysanthemum Garden, bridges modern-day Iran with mythic Portugal, weaving history, protest, and haunting inner worlds into a singular literary vision. Now based in Sweden, Safavi continues to write across languages and borders, always seeking the place where a story becomes a form of resistance.
