Simin Dāneshvar was an Iranian academic, novelist, fiction writer, and translator. She was largely regarded as the first major Iranian woman novelist. Her books dealt with the lives of ordinary Iranians, especially those of women, and through the lens of recent political and social events in Iran at the time.

Daneshvar had a number of firsts to her credit; in 1948, her collection of Persian short stories was the first by an Iranian woman to be published. The first novel by an Iranian woman was her Savushun ("Mourners of Siyâvash", also known as A Persian Requiem, 1966), which went on to become a bestseller. Daneshvar's Playhouse, a collection of five stories and two autobiographical pieces, is the first volume of translated stories by an Iranian woman author.

Being the wife of the famous Iranian writer Jalal al-Ahmad, she had a profound influence on his writing. She wrote the book the Dawn of Jalal in memory of her husband. Daneshvar was also a renowned translator, with a few of her translations being The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her last book is currently lost and was supposed to be the last book of her trilogy which started with the lost island. Al-Ahmad and Daneshvar never had a child.