MARSHA MEHRAN
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AUTHORAbout Marsha Mehran
Marsha Mehran was a brilliant, intelligent, and gifted writer, who lived the last few years of her life with mental health problems, in loneliness, and poverty.
Marsha Mehran’s debut novel, Pomegranate Soup, was published in 2005 and marked the start of her prolific writing career by age 26. She became truly a citizen of the world with abundant life and cultural experiences, upon which, she drew her inspirations for her literary work.
Marsha was born in Tehran, Iran in 1977 as Mahsa Mehran. She decided to use “Marsha” as her name when she was 12 years of age. Marsha’s talent and wit was evident from an early age. When she was four years old, she attended a Scottish school in Buenos Aires and became fluent in speaking Parsi, Spanish and English at age 6.
In 1984 at age 7, Marsha and her family moved to Miami, Florida, USA. She was quickly identified as a gifted child and was subsequently placed in a program for exceptional children at school. Over the course of her childhood and adolescence, Marsha excelled at learning to play the piano. In 1992 she and her family move to Adelaide, Australia, where she continued nurturing her musical talent at the Elder Conservatory of Music in Adelaide.
According to Abbas Mehran, Marsha’s father: “After birth, we named her “Mahsa”, which in the Persian language means “beautiful face as the moon”. At birth, Marsha was a very tiny baby with big, round and open eyes. Soon she became the center of attention; her beautiful doll shaped face with her inquisitive shining eyes attracted everybody.
The first present we gave her on her third day, after we brought her home from the hospital, was a music box, playing a bit of Beethoven’s Fur Elise. She would listen to the music and fall asleep. When she grew up and started to understand languages, we began to tell her stories from illustrated children’s books.”
Following her parents’ divorce in 1994, Marsha lived with her father in Adelaide during her high school years. In 1997, she returned to the US, this time to New York. She married Christopher Collins, an Irish American bartender with whom she had met in a Manhattan pub. They were together for ten years, living in America, Australia, and Ireland, and finally divorced in 2008.
Marsha Mehran passed away, lonely, in Ireland in her Lecanvey cottage in 2014 at the age of 36. Her first book, Pomegranate Soup was translated into 15 languages and published in 20 countries. The continuation, Rosewater and Soda Bread, was a hit sequel in Marsha’s vision for a series of seven books. The third title, Pistachio Rain, was scheduled for publication in 2014 but disrupted by her demise in April that year. Her stand-alone book has been published in Australia and New Zealand, by Harper Collins, as The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty, and by Amazon Crossing as The Saturday Night School of Beauty.
She leaves behind a literary legacy that will continue to thrive in her legion of fans across the globe.