by Furugh Farrukhzad

Furugh Farrukhzad (also spelled Forugh Farrokhzad) was born on January 5, 1935, to a middle-class family in Tehran, Iran. Her father, a colonel in the army, was a stern and often distant head of the family, who, nevertheless, provided Farrukhzad and her siblings with the leisure to browse the family’s well-stocked library of Persian literature. Farrukhzad’s literary interests blossomed early. By 13 she was experimenting with the classical poetic form known as the ruba`i (quatrain). Between the ages of 16 and 19, like many women from the urban Iranian middle classes, Farrukhzad completed middle school and then entered an arts school, where she studied sewing and painting. Her formal education ended in 1951 when she married Parviz Shapur, a man 15 years her senior. A year later their son, Kamyar, was born. In 1954 her life took a...