Marsha Mehran (1977–2014)

Marsha Mehran was born Mahsa Mehran in Tehran, Iran. In 1979, at the time of the Iranian Revolution, her family fled the country for Argentina, then emigrated to the USA. Marsha (she adopted the name at age 12) attended a private Scottish school in Buenos Aires and quickly became fluent in Spanish and English as well as Parsi.

She excelled at playing the piano and dreamed of becoming a concert pianist.
Following her parents’ divorce in 1994, Marsha went with her mother to Australia, where she attended high school, then returned to the USA. In New York City, she met and married Christopher Collins, an Irish-American bartender with whom she split her time between Ireland and the USA for 10 years before the couple divorced.
In 2005, she published
her debut novel, Pomegranate Soup, which became an international bestseller, translated into 15 languages and published in 20 countries. The sequel, Rosewater and Soda Bread (2008) -- the second in a planned series of seven books -- also was a hit. The third title, Pistachio Rain, was supposed to appear in 2014 but was never published due to her death that year. Her stand-alone novel The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty (also known as The Saturday Night School of Beauty) was published posthumously. Marsha Mehran experienced mental health problems in her last years and died a recluse in her home in the village of Lecanvey, Ireland, in 2014 at age 36.