Exploring a passionate life, bravely - author profile

Making the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award with your first novel is a dream debut for any Australian writer. Only six books made that list in 2024, one of them by recent University of Adelaide PhD graduate Hossein Asgari – Only Sound Remains. 

The Miles Franklin is given annually for “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. The list of winners is a veritable who’s who of Australian literature. Asgari finds himself in very good company, including University luminaries J.M. Coetzee, Peter Goldsworthy and Brian Castro who have been shortlisted in the past. 

“This is the first major work I have written in English, before this I always wrote in Farsi,” Asgari says in an on-campus interview. “Writing in Farsi is very different – it’s more emotive and fluid and from the heart. Writing in English is a more conscious process.” 

Asgari left Iran in 2007 for Malaysia, where he received his first PhD, in physics, from Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He migrated to Australia in 2013, and says, although he has always felt the urge to write, and has written since he was 18, “until I arrived here, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a degree in creative writing”. 

This discovery began a new journey for Asgari who commenced his PhD studies in the Department of English and Creative Writing in 2017. This novel – since substantially re-written – formed a part of his thesis. 

Only Sound Remains tells a fresh new story of Australian life, introducing this reader to aspects of the Iranian diaspora, displaced by conflict, and the literary and political life of that country at a critical time.

Set in Adelaide, interspersed with vivid depictions and memories of Iranian life around the time of the fall of the Shah, it is a multi-generational story being shared by a visiting father with his expatriate son. 

Central to this story is the feminist Iranian poet and film director Forugh Farrokhzad – a hugely controversial figure in her lifetime for her very open views about feminine lust and love at a time when this was never discussed, and women were more chattels than chatelains. Her early death in a car accident in 1967, aged 32, only added to her tragic mystique, and Asgari helps revive her story, and her work, as he weaves it through the narrative. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by her – by how much she was willing to sacrifice and suffer for her art,” Asgari says. “To write in 1950s Iran, as a woman, about desire was brave and ahead of her time. Her work was still banned when I first discovered it as a teenager.” 

Not only does Asgari bring this extraordinary figure to life in this novel, but he also gives new words to some of her poetry. His translations published in this book are clearly acts of devotion, as they sing their tales of love and loss and conflict. 

Only Sound Remains is unfailingly passionate and it is this passion which carries the reader forward, into a wonderful exploration of a topic worthy of examination, leaving readers both informed and entertained.

Written by Mark Douglas, Editor of Lumen.

Hossein Asgari received his PhD (Creative Writing) from the University of Adelaide in 2021 and thanks his “supervisors and friends at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice who were on my side for four wonderful years”. His novel was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2024.

An excerpt from his novel, along with his translation of the titular poem by Forugh Farrokhzad can be viewed here.

Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari, Puncher & Wattmann, 2023.

Portrait of the author, by Isaac Freeman, taken at the Rundle Street tea room, Curiositeas, where he often writes.