He is an Australian novelist.
Hamzeh Naghdi is an Australian novelist, calligrapher and type designer. He was born in Iran and lives in Canberra, where he writes full-time.
At the age of ten, he took up both writing and the formal study of Persian calligraphy. The two practices have run in parallel since.
In his twenties he worked as a graphic designer, first at Hejrat Publishing and later as head of art and graphic design at the Centre for Translation of the Holy Qur’an. Over about a decade he designed more than one hundred books, magazines and catalogues. In 2000 he received an award for his design of Hadith-e Zendegi magazine at a magazine festival in Isfahan.
In 2004 he received the Momtaz qualification in Persian calligraphy from the Iranian Calligraphists Association. From then on, calligraphy became a greater focus of his work, and he continued his study of Persian Naskh under Abdolsamad Samadi. In his thirties he left graphic design to write the complete Qur’an by hand in Persian Naskh script, a single continuous work that took nearly a decade. It was formally presented in Iran in 2011, and pages from it are held by the International Museum of the Holy Qur’an in Tehran. His work with letterforms later extended to the design of Persian typefaces.
After moving to Australia he began studying English literature in 2012. English was neither his first language nor the one in which he first wrote; it became the language of his fiction. By his forties the novel had become his principal work.
Several novels accumulated in his archive over the following years, revised rather than published. He is now editing and publishing them one at a time, each as an independent work. The first, D-Dyla.n, was published in August 2026. Ten novels are planned; the rest are coming soon.
His fiction stays close to what its characters do and remember, what they conceal, and what they leave unsaid. At its centre is a question that has remained with him since childhood: how a human life can be understood. The complete first chapter of each published novel is available on this website.
He continues to work with letterforms and the printed page alongside the fiction.
Calligraphy, type design and graphic design
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