Farzaneh Ghavami

Farzaneh Ghavami, b.1968, is a graduate of Persian Language and Literature and teaches Persian literature in Tehran high schools. Her poetry reflects her lived experience as a woman living and working under a dictatorship system that suppresses women and femininity. It is due to this situation that Farzaneh Ghavami, like many other Iranian contemporary female poets, uses her personal life to make political statements. In her poetry, a first person female narrator is in a permanent dialogue with a fictional beloved and it is through this dialogue that she absorbs the world. She uses her body and her lyrical conversations as a platform to make social and political statements about the contemporary socio-political situation in Iran.

She has so far published six collections as follows:

• “I had said I belonged to the generation of anxious Scheherazades”, 2002, shortlisted for Karnameh Poetry Prize

• “Only a bracelet remains from me”, 2005, shortlisted for Literary Journalists’ Poetry Award and Negah-e Nou Poetry Award

• “After seven hours and twenty-nine minutes of crying”, 2011

• “Katrina is my favorite hurricane”, 2015, shortlisted for Literary Journalists’ Poetry Award

• “When love was aged”, 2018

• “The Elegy of Rhubarb”. 2020