In 1940, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born to a poor shoemaker in Dowlatabad, a remote village in the Sabzavar the northwestern part of Khorasan province  He worked as a farmhand and attended Mas'ud Salman Elementary School, where he learned to read. Books were a revelation to the young boy. "I read all the romances that we had at that time around the village," he said in an interview."I would read on the roof of the house with a lamp…I read War and Peace that way." 

Dowlatabadi is celebrated as one of the most important writers in contemporary Iran, particularly for his use of language. He elevates rural speech, drawing on the rich, lyrical tradition of Persian poetry. He "examines the complexities and moral ambiguities of the experience of the poor and forgotten, mixing the brutality of that world with the lyricism of the Persian language," said Kamran Rastegar, a translator of Dowlatabadi's work.

One of his books is :The Colonel

The Colonel is a novel about nation, history, and family, beginning on a rainy night when two policemen summon the Colonel to collect the tortured body of his daughter, a victim of the" Islamic revolution " Dowlatabadi wrote the novel in the 1980's, when intellectuals were in danger of execution. "I hit it in a drawer when I finished it," he said. Though it is published abroad in English, the novel is not available in Iran, in Persian. "I did not even want to have this on their radar," he said. "Either they would take me to prison or prevent me from working. They would have their ways." The novel was first published in Germany, later in the UK and United States.

These are all information that I added from Wikipedia ,But What I really understand from his books is "his stories has effected from the surrounding and the old story in the society of Iran specially in the area that he lived , the old story like sage ,and Kelidar is one of his story that is very great example of his vision and what he feel .Kelidar is a saga about a Kurdish nomadic family that spans 10 books and 3,000 pages. Encyclopaedia Iranica praises its "heroic, lyrical, and sensual" language. The story is tremendously popular among Iranians due to "its detailed portrayal of political and social upheaval."Dowlatabadi spent over a decade crafting the tale. "I spent fifteen years preparing, writing short stories, sometimes writing works that were a little longer, the grounds towards what would become Kelidar," he said.

• 2011: Man Asian Literary Prize, longlist, The Colonel
• 2009: Haus der Kulturen Berlin International Literary Award, shortlist, The Colonel
• you can find the information here