Forough Farrokhzad was born on December 29, 1934 – February 13, 1967. She was an influential Iranian poet and film director. She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast, writing from a female point of view. Forough Farrokhzad was born in Tehran in 1935, to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar. The third of seven children, she attended school until the ninth grade, then was taught painting and sewing at a girls' school for the manual arts. At the age of 16 she was married to satirist Parviz Shapour. She continued her education with painting and sewing classes, and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. Her only child, a son named Kamyar Shapour,was born a year later. Farrokhzad spent nine months in Europe during 1958. After returning to Iran, in search of a job she met filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan, who reinforced her own inclinations to express herself and live independently, and with whom she began a love affair. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion, before traveling to Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy. This 1962 documentary film, titled The House is Black, is considered to be an essential part of the Iranian New Wave movement. During the 12 days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers. She adopted the boy and brought him to live at her mother's house. She published Reborn in 1964. Her poetry at that time varied significantly from previous Iranian poetic traditions. Farrokhzad's strong feminine voice became the focus of much negative attention and open disapproval, both during her lifetime and in posthumous reception of her work. In a radio interview, when asked about the feminine perspective in her poems, Farrokhzad replied: "If my poems, as you say, have an aspect of femininity, it is of course quite natural. After all, fortunately I am a woman. But if you speak of artistic merits, I think gender cannot play a role. In fact to even voice such a suggestion is unethical. It is natural that a woman, because of her physical, emotional, and spiritual inclinations, may give certain issues greater attention, issues that men may not normally address. I believe that if those who choose art to express their inner self, feel they have to do so with their gender in mind, they would never progress in their art and that is not right. So when I write, if I keep thinking, oh I'm a woman and I must address feminine issues rather than human issues, then that is a kind of stopping and self-destruction. Because what matters, is to cultivate and nourish one's own positive characteristics until one reaches a level worth of being a human. What is important is the work produced by a human being and not one labeled as a man or a woman. When a poem reaches a certain level of maturation, it separates itself from its creator and connects to a world where it is valid based on its own merits." Emphasizing on human issues, she also calls for a recognition of women's abilities that goes beyond the traditional binary oppositions.

click here