Josiane Cohanim was born in Iran, raised in Switzerland, and educated in the United States. She received her bachelor of arts degree in French and Spanish literature from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, a master’s in French literature from Stanford University, and achieved candidacy at Stanford’s French literature doctoral program. As an artist with a love for painting, she often drew inspiration from her passion for poetry and fiction. For an art project where she was to select a myth and render it into an abstract painting, she came upon the legendary character of Rostam and the mystical tales of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Compelled by the depth of the story and the idea that these stories travel beyond geographical and cultural confines, she delved deeper into this historic work. What began as a simple art project turned out to be a sixteen-year journey into translating twenty-five hundred pages of verse, more than fifty thousand couplets, culminating in a five-volume set published in September 2023. With the release of The Shahnameh: A new English Translation, Cohanim aims to captivate a broader English-speaking audience, inviting them to explore Ferdowsi’s timeless wisdom intricately woven in tales of kings and heroes.