Join Farsi poet Azita Ghahreman and her poet-translator Maura Dooley for an event celebrating her new collection Negative of a Group Photograph published by the Poetry Translation Centre and Bloodaxe Books.

Born in Iran, Azita Ghahreman has lived in Sweden since 2006 and is a cherished voice in contemporary Persian literature. Her deeply personal poems cover a vast emotional territory, ranging from the delicate restrained to the shockingly direct. Negative of a Group Photograph runs the gamut of Ghahreman’s experience: from her childhood in the Khorasan region of south-eastern Iran to her exile to Sweden, from Iran’s book-burning years and the war in Iraq to her unexpected encounters with love.

Azita and Maura will give a reading in Persian and English, after which they will be joined by their bridge translator Elhum Shakerifar for a Q&A on the translation process.

Azita Ghahreman is the author of five collections of poetry, Eve’s Songs (1991), Sculptures of Autumn (1995), Forgetfulness is a Simple Ritual (2002), The Suburb of Crows (2008) and Under Hypnosis in Dr Caligan’s Cabinet (2012). In 2013 she was a recipient of Swedish PEN’s Prince Wilhelm Award. Russian and Ukrainian translations of her poems were awarded the Udmurtia Russian Academy’s Ludvig Nobel Prize in 2014. She was born in Mashhad in 1962 and has lived and worked in Sweden since 2006.

Maura Dooley’s most recent poetry collections is The Silvering (2016). Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize and received both an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondley Award. She teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Elhum Shakerifar studied Persian Literature at Oxford University. She is a BAFTA-nominated producer and curator of film, and 2017 recipient of the Women in Film & Television Award for her documentary work.

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