Forugh Farrokhzad

Forugh Farrokhzad, also spelled Farrokhzad, was an Iranian poet and film director and one of the most influential Persian poets of the twentieth century. She wrote in Persian during the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi, at a time when Iran was rapidly adopting Western ways. Her work broke with the rigid forms of classical Persian poetry, and she died in a car accident at the age of 32.

She was born in Tehran into a middle-class family that observed Islamic traditions. Sources differ on her exact birth date, which falls between late 1934 and early 1935. She studied painting and sewing at a school for girls, and at sixteen she married her cousin Parviz Shapour, a satirist. They had a son, Kamyar, but the divorce in 1954 gave custody of the boy to his father, and her family cut her off. That painful period came before she made her name as a writer.

In 1955 she published Asir (Captive), her first collection. Its rebellious, uncompromising verses drew the scorn of conservative critics, the attention of hostile newspapers, and accusations that she was corrupting society. After a nervous breakdown that led to a psychiatric clinic, she spent months travelling in Europe in 1956. Her later books developed free verse, colloquial language and an intimate, direct voice. She met the writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, with whom she shared ideas about independence and free expression, and their relationship lasted until her death.

In 1962 she directed The House Is Black, a short documentary about a leprosy colony in Tabriz that many now see as a key work of the Iranian New Wave. Her 1964 collection Another Birth marks her break, in both form and personal outlook, from older poetic traditions. She also explored acting for the stage and was preparing a role when she died in February 1967.

After the Islamic Revolution her poetry was banned and censored for more than a decade. Her strong feminine voice, which unsettled conservative circles, was later championed by writers and filmmakers around the world, and she is now widely seen as a symbol of feminism in Iran. Her posthumous poem Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season is regarded by some as one of the best-structured modern poems in Persian. Her work reached English readers in the following decades, and Spanish readers only at the start of the twenty-first century.