Fereydoun Tankaboni, Author of 'Islamic Absurd Republic', Passes Away

Fereydoun Tankaboni, a novelist and founding member of the Iranian Writers' Association and the Council of Writers and Artists, passed away on Saturday, October 7, at the age of 87 in Germany after a period of illness. The Iranian Writers' Association announced on Sunday, October 8, that Fereydoun Tankaboni, born in 1937, a novelist and satirist, died in a nursing home in Cologne, Germany. Tankaboni published his first work titled 'A Man in a Cage' at the beginning of the 1960s and subsequently began collaborating with publications, especially in the field of political satire. Among his notable works are 'Notes from a Crowded City', 'Captive of the Soil', 'Walking on the Rails', 'Money, the Only Value and Measure of Values', 'The Sorrow of Being Sterile', and 'Islamic Absurd Republic'. Some observers have described him as a 'skilled, influential, and professional satirist' and a 'creative and forgotten elite writer' who died 'in exile and in a nursing home'. After the 1979 Revolution, Fereydoun Tankaboni, along with several other poets and writers including Houshang Ebtehaj and Siavash Kasraei, became close to the Tudeh Party and defended the party's positions regarding the Islamic Republic, which faced criticism from the majority of the members of the Iranian Writers' Association. Following these events, Tankaboni, who was a member of the Iranian Writers' Association until 1979, separated from this association and a year later, in 1980, founded the 'Council of Writers and Artists' with a group of other cultural figures. This well-known writer and satirist left Iran for Europe in 1983 due to governmental pressures on writers and artists and the arrest of several of them, and had been residing in Cologne, Germany since then.