Reza Barahani received a bachelor's degree in English language and literature from the University of Tabriz at the age of 22 and emigrated to Turkey afterwards. He received a doctorate in the same subject in Turkey and then returned to Iran.

Barahani moved to the United States in 1972 and began teaching. During his one-year stay in the US, he criticized lack of freedom of speech and government censorship in Iran at various universities, which led to his arrest by the Iranian Security and Intelligence Organization, SAVAK, when he returned to Iran in 1973.

He was tortured and held in solitary confinement for three months and 12 days. Later he was transferred to a public ward and eventually released from prison after a year. He left Iran for the United States once more in 1974.

Barahani later described his hard days of imprisonment and the tortures he suffered at the hands of SAVAK agents, in various speeches and interviews in the United Statesm which resulted in him receiving an award from the American Journalists' Association in 1977.

Barahani returned to Iran a week after Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, left the country and went into exile in 1979. In the following years, he published many of his works that were not allowed to be published by the previous government.

He held several workshops on literary criticism, poetry and storytelling in the early 1990s. Shiva Arastooei, Shams Aghajani, Roozbeh Hosseini and Mahsa Mohebali were among his most famous students.

In the early 1990s, the Ministry of Intelligence in the government of then president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani set in motion a project, which later became known as Chain Murders, to assassinate many Iranian intellectuals, writers, and political activists.

The “Armenian bus” incident was part of the Chain Murders of Iran and took place on August 6, 1996. Under the pretext of taking Iranian writers to Armenia by an invitation from Armenian Writers' Association, agents of the Ministry of Intelligence planned to drive a bus with 21 writers off a hillside into a ravine before they reached their destination. But the driver – who was an agent of the Ministry – fumbled the attempt and two of the passengers were able to save the bus before it crashed.

Barahani was one of the writers invited to the trip, but he, along with four other writers, canceled at the last moment. He was suspicious because of certain irregular conditions and the government's insistence that the trip proceed.

After this incident and feeling that his life was in danger, Barahani decided to leave Iran for good. He emigrated to Canada. He wrote poetry, novels and literary critiques and taught at York University in Toronto, and also chaired the Canadian PEN Association for two years.

His poetry collection includes "The Deer of the Garden," "The Jungle and The City," "Night, Starting from Midday," "An Evil Under the Sun" and "Great Sorrows." Among his novels are "Song of the Slain," "From One Well to Another," "The Infernal Times of Mr. Ayaz," "Elias in New York," "Mysteries of My Land," "What Happened After the Wedding" and “Azadeh Khanoom and Her Author".