Letter Reveals Iranian Translator Pantea Eqbalzadeh Committed Suicide
Following reports of the death of Pantea Eqbalzadeh, an Iranian translator of children's literature, a handwritten letter attributed to her says she committed suicide.
Following reports of the death of Pantea Eqbalzadeh, an Iranian translator of children's literature, a handwritten letter attributed to her says she committed suicide.
Twitter accounts published the letter of the young translator before her death, in which she wrote to her father that she no longer has "hope for the improvement of the situation in the country".
Pantea is the daughter of Shahram Eqbalzadeh, one of the prominent figures of Iranian children's literature.
Translations of The Longest Night by Marion Dane Bauer, Alligator Baby, Angela's Airplane, The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch are among her works.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported the suicide of a 39-year-old journalist from Dehdasht named Ali Sadeghi.
A source close to Sadeghi's family told HRANA that "Ali did this because of poverty and unemployment."
Iranian journalists, writers and translators have been under various political and economic pressures in recent decades. In addition to bans and censorship, job insecurity is the main reason for their dire economic situation.
Within the past nine months since the beginning of the nationwide "Women, Life, Freedom" protests in Iran, the suicide of a number of protesters after being released from prison has attracted a lot of attention on social media.
According to PEN America’s 2021 Freedom to Write Index, Iran jailed the fourth-highest number of writers and public intellectuals in the world. In 2022, arrests of writers and other artists have spiked dramatically.
