Abar Radi or Akbar Rādi (Persian: اکبر رادی; 2 October 1939 – 26 December 2007) was an Iranian playwright. He completed his studies at the University of Tehran in social sciences. He published his first story, Rain, in 1959.

Melody of a Rainy City, The Descent, The Fishermen, Death in Autumn, From behind the Glasses, The Glorious Smile of Mr. Gil, and Beneath the Saqqakhaneh Passage are among his well-known works.

The 68-year-old playwright whose works have been compared with those of Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen died in a Tehran hospital on December 26, 2007.

Radi was born to a middle-class family and was raised in the city of Rasht, where he lived the first eleven years of his life until his father, the owner of a confectionery factory, went bankrupt. Consequently, the family moved to Tehran in 1948, where he attended Lycée Razi (see FRANCE xv. FRENCH SCHOOLS IN PERSIA) in 1951, graduating in 1959. After completing a yearlong course in teachers’ training, he was employed by the Ministry of Education in 1962. He received his bachelor's degree from the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Tehran's Faculty of Letters and Humanities in 1964, and stayed on to continue his graduate studies in the same discipline, but he dropped out before completing his master's degree. In 1976 he started teaching playwriting in the Moʾassesa-ye morabbiyān-e omur-e honari (Institute for training art instructors) affiliated to the Ministry of Education, from which he retired in 1994. He began teaching playwriting as a free-lance lecturer in the University of Tehran in 1996, a position that he held until 1998. He married Ḥamideh ʿAnqāʾ in 1965. They had two sons, Āryā (1966) and Āraš (1971).

In 1954, Radi was introduced to the works of Sadeq Hedayat, the prominent storywriter, and wrote his first novella, Muš-e mordeh (The dead mouse), which was published in the Kayhan newspaper in 1956, and in the same year won the first prize in the competition for fiction writing, established by Eṭṭelāʿāt-e javānān, an offshoot of Eṭṭelāʿāt which was published for the youth (Šarifi, p. 673). A staging of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's (1828-1906) A Doll's House in 1957 in Tehran, as he acknowledged later, was a turning point in his literary career. “I would have never become a playwright had I not seen that play.” (ʿAnqāʾ, personal notes; Oskuʾi, p. 281) Rowzaneh-ye ābi (The blue outlet, Tehran, 1962; Figure 2, Figure 3) and Oful (The decline, Tehran, 1964), Radi's first two plays, written after experiencing Ibsen, garnered critical appreciation from Šāhin Sarkisiyān, the acclaimed director, as “an innovative step in dramatic literature (Raḥmati and Dowlatābādi, p. 121). A family saga, Rowzaneh-ye ābi, revolves around incessant conflicts between a father and his four young children, who stand against his traditional beliefs. The mother supports her children and forces the father out of the house. “The credo propounded in Radi's works,” as noted by Moḥammad Čarmšir, “does not belong just to a sole character, but to all characters, as well as the audience” (Ṭālebi, p. 91).

In the following years many of Radi's works of fiction, including “Jāddeh” (The road), “Suʾ-e tafāhom” (Misunderstanding), and “Kučeh” (The alley), were published in major periodicals. His plays Moḥāq (The waning, Tehran, 1965), Mosāferān (The travelers, Tehran, 1966), Marg dar pāʾiz (Death in autumn, Tehran, 1967), and Az pošt-e šišehā (From behind the glasses, Tehran, 1967), all were released as television productions, directed by ʿAbbās Javānmard in 1967.

Az pošt-e šišehā, a play in four acts, tells the story of two couples, depicting the adverse conditions surrounding the lives of intellectuals, then a major issue of concern in Iran. The confined living room of one of the couples that live in solitude structurally and thematically mirrors the outside world, which the other couple represents. It earned the praise of a critic as “a play with which everybody would sympathize and relate with his entire being” (Bayżāʾi, p. 371). Jalāl Āl-e Aḥmad, however, did not concur with what he held as Radi's portrayal of the play's main character as a rowšanfekr-e pizori “false intellectual” (Asadi, 2005, p. 109). Mostafa Abdollahi revived “From behind the glasses” at Sangalaj theater in 2009.

By technical focus on spatial dynamics and staging, Radi turned his plays into a forum in which the intimate relationships of emotionally diverse individuals were displayed, and private fates mirrored societal tensions. “The spatial dimension became a central factor for Radi in his playwriting. He understood that the conception of the stage as a room had come to dominate modern drama as a result of the focus on the individual and his intimate relationships” (Zahedi, 2006, pp. 112–13).