About Aramofen
Aramofen is the pen name of an Iranian novelist. He set his name aside so the story could travel without its author’s shadow, in an age when loving Iran still carries a price. No other personal details have been made public, and that choice is part of the book’s meaning: the messenger does not matter, the trust does.
His fiction walks the line between novel and document. The people in his stories are invented, but the ground they walk on is built from verified events of Iran’s modern history, and every historical account is sourced in the footnotes and in the book’s Sources and Notes. His prose runs on two currents: short sentences that land like a pulse, and the warmth of the oral storytelling of Iranian homes, threaded here and there with echoes of classical Persian literature.
His lifelong subject is a single idea: truth as a trust, passed from hand to hand and from one generation to the next, to be delivered intact. He does not write history for the past; he writes it for the future. In his words, we only understand history when we live it, not merely read it. That is where the subtitle comes from.
Keeper of Truth is his first novel. Before it, he spent years publishing short stories, notes and clips on X; they will soon be gathered on this site.
Some trusts cannot be laid down.
The pen name is not concealment; it is a choice. The face on this site is Aramofen’s and no one else’s: a portrait created for an author who set his name aside. When the author steps aside, the reader is left alone with the story, and the story with the trust it carries. "Aramofen" is always written as one word.
The fog
The fog the regime draws over the truth, and which new media tear apart piece by piece.
The lamp
The lamp that nameless people have kept lit in the dark. The book’s cover comes from here.
The trust
The key to the whole novel: truth survives because someone chooses to carry it.