Iranian thinker
Samad Behrangi
Samad BehrangiChildren's and young-adult literature; Azerbaijani folklore studiesIranian1939–1968
"Death could easily come for me right now, but as long as I can live, I must not walk toward it. Of course, if I'm ever forced to face death — as I will be — it doesn't matter; what matters is what effect my life or death has on the lives of others."
Life and Thought
Samad Behrangi (1939–1968) was an Iranian Azerbaijani teacher, writer, and folklorist whose children's stories, most famously "The Little Black Fish," helped shape Iran's socially committed literature. In "An Investigation into Educational Problems in Iran," he criticized the country's school system, and he drowned in the Aras River at the age of 29, in circumstances many have considered suspicious.
Samad Behrangi was born on June 24, 1939, in the Charandab neighborhood of Tabriz, into a working-class, Turkish-speaking family. After finishing his early schooling, he entered a teacher-training school in 1957 at age 18 and began teaching in the rural schools of East Azerbaijan Province, including Azarshahr and Mamaghan — work he continued for the rest of his short life. During this time, he earned a bachelor's degree in English language and literature from the Faculty of Literature at Tabriz University.
Behrangi began his writing career with satire and translations from Turkish, publishing his first story, "Habit," in 1960. Together with Behrouz Dehghani, he compiled and published the collection "Tales of Azerbaijan," and devoted much of his life to recording Azerbaijani folk stories, proverbs, and riddles. His best-known work, "The Little Black Fish" (1968), is an allegorical tale about a small fish who leaves the stream in search of the sea — a story widely read as a metaphor for individual struggle and self-sacrifice against the status quo.
In "An Investigation into Educational Problems in Iran" (1965), he criticized the country's formal education system, arguing that the curriculum devised in Tehran was mismatched to the needs of rural and Azerbaijani children. Fluent in Azeri Turkish, he also translated poems by Ahmad Shamlou, Forough Farrokhzad, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales into that language.
His social activism and critical writings drew the attention of SAVAK in the mid-1960s, and he was repeatedly interrogated and threatened. On September 31 (Shahrivar 9), 1968, while on a trip to collect folklore near the Khoda Afarin region on the Soviet border, he drowned in the Aras River — a death many of his contemporaries considered suspicious, given its unclear circumstances and the pressure SAVAK had placed on him. His works have been repeatedly reprinted and translated into many languages, and remain among the most enduring texts of Iranian children's and young-adult literature.