“I come from a country where writers are either imprisoned or killed. My poems are nothing but an ode to life.”

Poems translated from Persian by Jalal Alavinia

Born in 1983 in Tehran, Mahtab Ghorbani began writing poetry at a very young age. Later, an encounter with the celebrated Iranian writer Ali Ashraf Darvishian awakened in her a deep love of literature. As a student in Iran, she was expelled from university for her activism in support of women’s rights and for writing political and erotic poetry. Her works are now banned in Iran. Repeatedly imprisoned for her poems, she went into exile in France in 2016 with her daughter. She has since published a collection of poetry in Persian in London, then in Paris with Éditions du Net. Her next book will be published by Éditions Bruno Doucey.