Iranian women’s voices

Sana Nassari introduces 'Iranian women's voices' inspired by one of Iran's most celebrated poets, Forough Farrokhzad.

by Sana Nassari

1st September 2025

A crowd of Iranian women marching as snow falls, with some holding umbrellas.

March 1979, Tehran. © Hengameh Golestan, Courtesy of Archaeology of the Final Decade, picture edited by Missohio Studio

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Iranian women's voices

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"Inspired by the poet and filmmaker, Forough Farrokhzad, who defied convention and the patriarchy, Iranian writers and artists reflect on present-day Iran and dream for the future."

When I met with my co-editors Shara Atashi and Marjorie Lotfi to plan an issue of WritersMosaic focusing on the voices of Iranian women today, we kept returning to the celebrated Iranian poet and filmmaker of an earlier generation, Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967).

Forough Farrokhzad smoking a pipe. — Forough Farrokhzad in 1965, public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Forough’s poetry flows through the writing of all the contributors to this issue, despite our vastly different backgrounds and the diverse forms and themes we sought to explore. Some contributors wrote in direct response to one of her poems, ‘O, You Frontier of Gems’, while others cast only a passing glance at her work. But as Nietzsche famously said, ‘If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’.

This guest edition features Shara Atashi’s article, ‘My bejewelled land’, and Marjorie Lotfi’s poem sequence, ‘Song and Wind’. Though both writers have spent most of their lives outside Iran, their work reveals how Iran has continued to live within them. My own contribution, ‘Iranian women’s defiant art of resistance’, explores the artistic forms of resistance that have emerged in Iran in recent years.

Six further pieces enrich this edition: ‘A three-act dream’, a fusion of poetry and prose by Razieh Khoshnood, a poet and translator based in Tehran; ‘Flesh’, a long poem by the Iranian poet Sepideh Jodeyri, who is based in Washington D.C.; ‘Revisiting Forough Farrokhzad’s ironic depiction of the “Frontier of Gems”’, an article by Laleh Atashi, an academic based in Iran; Forouz Zarei’s ‘Poems of resistance’ exploring body, migration, and the struggle to create and remember amidst displacement, repression, and resistance; an essay exploring the dissonance of witnessing Iran’s uprising from afar by writer Anahit Behrooz; and ‘The return of the God of the 1980s’ by Atash Shakarami, a painter based in Tehran.

Most of the writers featured in this edition were commissioned months before the recent twelve-day war between Israel and Iran, but Atash Shahkarami’s piece – commissioned later – emerges as a powerful personal reflection on war, repression and the enduring struggle for justice in Iran. I am pleased to invite you to read Iranian women’s voices.