Shahriar Mandanipour is an award-winning Iranian novelist in modern Persian literature and is now a well-known international writer. He won the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children's novel of 2004; the Golden Tablet Award for best fiction of the past 20 years in Iran, 1998; and Best Film Critique at the Press Festival in Tehran (1994). Mandanipour "was prohibited from publishing his fiction in his native country between 1992 and 1997. He came to the United States in 2006, as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University, and stayed in America."