Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is an Iranian writer and actor, known for his promotion of social and artistic freedom in contemporary Iran and his realist depictions of rural life, drawn from personal experience.

In 1940, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born to a poor shoemaker in Dowlatabad, a remote village in the Sabzevar, the northwestern part of Khorasan Province, Iran. He worked as a farmhand and attended Masud Salman Elementary School, where he learned to read. Books were a revelation to the young boy. I read all the romances that we had at that time around the village, he said in an interview. I would read on the roof of the house with a lampI read War and Peace that way. Though his father had little formal education, he introduced Dowlatabadi to the Persian Classical poets, Saadi Shirazi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi. generally spoke in the kind of language they used, Dowlatabadi said.

Source: Wikipedia