TEHRAN – An audiobook featuring interviews with popular American writer Ernest Hemingway, whose adventurous lifestyle won him admiration from later generations, has been published for Persian audiences.

The Iranian platform Avaye Chirok has prepared the audiobook based on a Persian translation of “Ernest Hemingway: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” by Hossein Karbalai-Taher.

The original edition was published in 2015 by Melville House and the Iranian publisher Aftabkaran released the Persian edition in 2017.

Narrations have been done by three artists. Bahman Vakhshour has lent his voice to Hemingway, while Zeinab Hajihosseini and Zeinab Afkhami voice the journalists and the narrator respectively.

The book comprises an extraordinary collection of pugnacious, charming, and revealing interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning author who defined and transformed American literature.

Hemingway was not only known for his understated style, but for his public image as America’s greatest author and journalist – and for the grand, expansive, adventurous way he lived his life. The prickly wit and fierce dedication to his craft that defined Hemingway’s life and work shine through in this unprecedented collection of interviews.

The first one conducted by George Plimpton was published under the title of “Ernest Hemingway, the Art of Fiction, No. 21” in the Paris Review in May 1954.

The conversation was done in a Madrid café. It starts with a description of where Hemingway writes.

“Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. He has a special workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing to the tower room only when ‘characters’ drive him up there.

“The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the main room of the house. The door between the two is kept ajar by a heavy volume listing and describing ‘The World’s Aircraft Engines.’ The bedroom is large, sunny, the windows facing east and south letting in the day’s light on white walls and a yellow-tinged tile floor.”

The book also carries Robert Manning’s interview “Hemingway in Cuba” published by the Atlantic monthly in December 1954.

The collection also features two other interviews;  “Dropping in on Hemingway” by Lloyd Lockhart, which was published by the Star weekly magazine in April 1958, and “Life in the Afternoon: The Last Interview” by Robert Emmett Ginna that was printed by Esquire in May 1958.

Photo: A poster for the audiobook of the Persian edition of “Ernest Hemingway: The Last Interview and Other Conversations”.

MMS/YAW