Kirk Noreen's musical setting of a poem by Forough Farrokhzad was performed by Sospeso on the December 12 concert.

Forough Farrokhzad, by any standard an important poet of the twentieth century, is also one of very few Iranian women to have achieved individual success within Iran.  She was born into a middle-class Tehran family in 1935.  Early on she displayed an interest in literature, poetry, and painting.  She begain composing poetry in when she was eleven; she studied at the Khosrow-Khauvar High School until ninth grade, at which point she studied sewing and painting at the Women’s Art Institute of Kamal-almolk.  She also studied painting privately with Bahjat Sadr, Katouzian, and Master Potgar.

In 1951 she married, and the next year her first collection of poems was published.  Asir (The Captive) includes forty-four works.  She moved to Ahvaz and gave birth to her only child, Kamyar, in 1953.  Two years later her marriage dissolved; formally separated from her husband, she was hospitalized for emotional distress.

In 1956 she spent nine months in Italy, and during this time her second collection, Divar (The Wall), was published.  She dedicated this volume of twenty-five poems to her ex-husband “in remembering our past together, and with the hope that this insignificant gift will be a response to his unlimited kindness.”

In 1957, she travelled in Italy and Germany, and the third collection, Osyan (The Rebellion) was released.  A travel journal of Europe, In Another Land, and the short story Kabous (The Nightmare) were published in magazines.

In the early sixties, she was in England studying and researching film production.  She also met Ebrahim Golestan, a controversial film producer; she began working with his film production company, and went to Khouzestan to edit a film covering disastrous oil fires; she also began work on several documentaries, one of which, a documentary on traditional Iranian courtship, was commissioned by the Canadian Film Organization.  From this point on, she worked in various capacities on documentaries; she did sound for The Wave, Corals, and Flint, which won first prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival; her own film, A Fire, won the gold and bronze prizes there.  Her film The House is Black was filmed on location in a leprosy colony in Baba Baghi, and she adopted a young boy, Hossein (Esfandiyar).  Her activities, as well as merely her status as a divorced female poet, attracted much attention and considerable disapproval. 

In 1964, Another Birth, her fourth volume of poetry, was published, dedicated to her companion Golestan.  The same year saw the release of the first edition of her Selected Poems.  The next year UNESCO produced a thirty-minute film on her life, and Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci filmed a fifteen-minute interview with her.  Her fifth volume of poetry, Belief in Winter, was not completed, as she died in a car crash in February 1967; Forough, the most celebrated woman in the 1100-year history of Persian literature, was thirty-two.

Adapted from Zarrin Shaghaghi's site Forough Farrokhzad.