Anita Amirrezvani Biography and latest books by Anita Amirrezvani

Author Anita Amirrezvani was born in Tehran and was raised in the United States. When she was 14 her father took her to a carpet shop and asked her to choose one for herself. The old, beautiful rug she selected prompted her to find out more about the lives of the people who would have toiled hard behind creating the beauty. Thus was born her first novel titled The Blood Of Flowers.

Before her novel The Blood of Flowers, she worked for 10 years as a dance critic and arts writer at two newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an arts publicist. She felt extremely fortunate to be able to write about dance, which is getting less print coverage.

Her childhood

After her parents separated when she was just two, she was raised by my mother in San Francisco. When she was around 13, Anita started mingling and spending time in Iran on my own to know the father’s side of the family. In San Francisco, her family was a small, intimate group that consisted of her, her mother and her aunt; but in Tehran, a family dinner party meant more like a town hall meeting. She had 11 cousins and two little brothers.

Trip to Isfahan

Her father took her sightseeing to Isfahan when she was fourteen, even though he was preoccupied creating his business and didn’t have too much time on hand. Because I was fascinated with art and architecture, he agreed to take me around. The author was mesmerized by “the great square of Isfahan and by the painted plasterwork on the staircase of our hotel,” she states on her website.

Then she decided to take a year off between high school and college and spend some more time in Iran. That year, the Islamic Revolution happened. She heard gunfire and saw the blue sky turn black with smoke. On her 17th birthday, the city was under a curfew. Less than ten days later, her father and stepmother decided the situation was unsafe to continue staying there. So they packed up her step brothers, and left.

She then studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in English.

It took Anita around five years to get to the end of the first draft, and she didn’t announce to anyone that she was working on a novel. As part of the research, she spent a lot of time reading about Iranian history and literature. She also asked her father and stepmother to take her to Isfahan on two separate occasions in order to be able to pen the settings in the novel better.