Oliver Harris/Farid Ghadami – Two Assassins: Hassan Sabbah/William Burroughs

“Two Assassins is a unique collaborative work, part detective story, part literary scholarship, part historical research, and part personal memoir that seeks to unravel a mystery: what the 11th-century Persian master of the Assassins, Hassan Sabbah, really meant for William Burroughs. Oliver Harris sheds light on the many untold backstories and dark textual secrets behind Burroughs’ invocations of Hassan Sabbah by retracing his own path of scholarship over the past 40 years. The result is a quest to discover the emotional as well as intellectual connections between the American writer and his most dedicated scholar. Farid Ghadami, on the other hand, tells the story of the real historical figure of Hassan Sabbah and his Ismaili successors, drawing on Persian and Arab sources to uncover some of the most important facts behind the legends. But he too follows a personal journey, tracing the intersection of William Burroughs and Hassan Sabbah back to his own roots as a descendent of the peoples of Alamout, his citadel in northern Iran. Tracking back and forth between individual and cultural memory, fact and fantasy, ‘Two Assassins’ brings to life the fascinating story of an unlikely and extraordinary relationship.“

Oliver Harris’ life as a Burroughsian began in 1984 with a PhD at Oxford that nobody would supervise. He has since gone on to publish seventeen books about and by Burroughs. He is Professor of American Literature at Keele University, President of the European Beat Studies Network and the proud father of Ella, Mia, Nina and Vivi.

Farid Ghadami is an Iranian writer and literary translator, who has to date published more than fifty books in the fields of literature, art, philosophy, engineering sciences and mathematics. In 2021, after many years of teaching in Iranian engineering faculties, he came to Paris to write his doctoral thesis in American literature at Université Paris-Est Créteil.