Forough Farrokhzad

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Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January 5, 1935 — February 13, 1967) was an Iranian poet.

Forough Farrokhzad, Parvin E'tesami and Simin Behbahani are usually considered the most famous modern female poets of Iran.

Forough was born in Tehran to career military officer Mohammad Bager Farrokhzad and his wife in 1935. She was the third of seven children and attended school until the ninth grade, then learning painting and sewing at a girl's school for the manual arts. At age sixteen or seventeen she was married to Parviz Shapour, an acclaimed satirist. Forough continued her education with classes in painting and sewing and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. A year later, she had her only child, a son (subject of "A Poem for You").

Within two years, in 1954, Forough and her husband divorced. Parviz won custody of the child. She moved back to Tehran to write poetry and published her first volume, entitled The Captive, in 1955.

Forough, as a female divorcée writing controversial poetry with a strong feminine voice, became the focus of much negative attention and open disapproval. In 1958 she spent nine months in Europe and met film-maker/writer Ebrahim Golestan, who inspired her to express herself and live independently. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion before going to Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy. This 1962 film was called The House is Black and won awards world-wide. During 12 days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers, whom she adopted and had live in her mother's house.

In 1963 she published the volume Another Birth and by now her poetry was mature and sophisticated, also being a profound change from previous modern Iranian poetic conventions.

On February 13, 1967, at 4:30 pm, Forough died in a car accident at age thirty-two. In order to avoid hitting a school bus, she swerved her Jeep, which hit a stone wall; she died before reaching the hospital. Her poem Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season was published posthumously and is considered the best-structured modern poem in Persian.

A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann's A Lonely Woman, was published in 1987. Also about her is a chapter in Farzaneh Milani's work "Veils and Words: the Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers" (1992).

She is the sister of the singer, poet and political activist Fereydoon Farrokhzad.