Reza Baraheni (; 13 December 1935 – 25 March 2022) was an Iranian novelist, poet, critic, and political activist. Baraheni lived in Toronto, Canada, where he used to teach at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He was the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism, written in Persian and English. His works have been translated into a dozen of languages. His book, Crowned Cannibals, is accused by a few of containing some fabrications. Moreover, he translated into Persian works by Shakespeare, Kundera, Mandelstam, Andrić, and Fanon. Winner of the Scholars-at-Risk-Program Award of the University of Toronto and Massey College, Baraheni taught at the University of Tehran, Iran, the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and York University. He was also Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford University, Britain, Fellow of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and Fellow of Winters College, York University. He was president of PEN Canada. He died on 24 March 2022 in Toronto, Canada, and was buried on 9 April 2022 at Elgin Mills Cemetery, Canada. Political life Baraheni, along with his friends and fellow writers, Jalal Al-Ahmad and Gholamhossein Saedi, initiated the first steps in 1966 leading to the founding of the Writers Association of Iran in the following year. Their meeting with the Shah's Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveida in that year, led to an open confrontation with the Shah's regime, placing the struggle for unhampered transmission of thought as a preliminary step towards genuine democracy on the agenda of Iran's contemporary history. In spite of the struggle of some of the most famous writers of the country to turn the Writers Association of Iran into an officially recognized human rights organization, the Shah’s government suppressed the association, intimidated many of its members, arresting and torturing some of its members, among them Baraheni, who had returned from the United States after the completion of a year-long teaching position in Texas and Utah. In 1973, he was arrested and imprisoned in Tehran. Baraheni claimed he was tortured and kept in a solitary confinement for 104 days (See God’s Shadow, Prison Poems, 1976; The Crowned Cannibals, 1977, Introduction by E.L. Doctorow). Back in the United States a year later, Baraheni joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg,