Arash Hejazi, born 1971 in Tehran, Iran, is an Iranian novelist, fiction writer and translator of literary works from English and Portuguese into Persian. He is the main translator of Paulo Coelho’s books in Iran. His first translation was “The Alchemist”: “It’s a masterpiece of modern literature”, he says.

This is the English transcript of Mr Hejazi’s interview about Paulo Coelho and his books with the Folha de São Paulo on 16 May 2000. The original interview, in Portuguese, is included in this transcript.