Novelist and storyteller

Maryam Ghodrat was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran, the fourth of eight children. She fell in love with writing as a child and was filling pages with essays long before she finished school.

With her husband, she has built a family and a life that has taken them across the globe. In Iran, they made their home from Bushehr on the Persian Gulf to Nowshahr on the Caspian coast, and spent most of those years in Tehran, where they raised their two daughters, before moving to Canada in the spring of 2014.

Maryam writes in Farsi. Her writing did not receive approval for publication in Iran, and her novel, بیا محبت را قسمت کنیم (Let’s Share the Kindness), was published in Farsi in Canada by Red Oak. Its English translation is coming soon... She now devotes her time to writing new work and completing stories she began years ago.

She also hosts her own book club on Telegram, where she reads aloud to a community of Farsi-speaking listeners, sharing her original short stories alongside the work of other writers. You can also listen to her read her own short stories on YouTube.

Maryam lives in Ottawa, where she finds inspiration on long walks in nature. A longtime yoga practitioner, she volunteers as an online yoga teacher for Farsi speakers, and she is rarely without a creative project in hand.