Original version

BBC World Service South Asia

The Forum

Documentaries

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The programme that explains the present by exploring the past

The programme that explains the present by exploring the past.

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service

BBC World Service News Internet

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

BBC World Service East Asia

The Forum: Forugh Farrokhzad: A trailblazing voice for women in Iran

Forugh Farrokhzad

05/01/2023 GMT

Forugh Farrokhzad: A trailblazing voice for women in Iran

BBC World Service - The Forum, Forugh Farrokhzad: A trailblazing voice for women in Iran

How the courage and audacity of an Iranian writer continues to inspire

Known to Iranians simply by her first name, in her short life Forugh emerged as a writer of startling originality and daring.

Forugh Farrokhzad burst into the public consciousness with a series of poems that sent shockwaves through Persian society in the mid-1950s. Her early poetry focused on the female experience and female desire, overturning – in the words of one biographer – 1,000 years of Persian literature.

Her critics sought to dismiss her skills as a writer by seeing her poetry purely as a confessional outburst of a divorced woman. That attitude has tended to overshadow her achievements, although her private life is so compelling it’s perhaps inevitable. Since her early death in a car accident, Forugh’s life and poetry have been inspirational for many Iranians, who see in her an artist who was prepared to defy authority and convention to speak out.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Sholeh Wolpé, a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She’s a poet, playwright, librettist and translator of Forugh’s work; author Jasmin Darznik, associate professor and chair of the creative writing progamme at California College of the Arts.  Her novel, Song of a Captive Bird, is a re-imagining of Forugh’s life inspired by her poetry, interviews and correspondence; and Levi Thompson, Assistant Professor of Persian and Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s the author of Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry. 

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Photo: Forugh Farrokhzad. Credit: Courtesy of Farrokhzadpoem.com)

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Forum

Forugh Farrokhzad: A trailblazing voice for women in Iran

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC World Service South Asia

About BBC World Service