Ziba Karbassi Iran

ZIBA KARBASSI was born in Tabriz, north western Iran. She has been writing poems from an early age. Her first book in Farsi was published in her early twenties and since then she has published more than ten books, both in her mother tongue and internationally, and she is widely regarded as the leading poet of her generation. Her dense revolutionary and lyric poetry achieves a layered intensity and open-meshed space that is rare in contemporary poetry. She was chairperson of the Iranian Writers Association (in exile) from 2002 to 2004 and editor of Asar.name and one of the editors of Exiled Ink literature magazine in London. She was also chair of Exiled Writers Ink in UK from 2012-2014. In 2009 she won the Golden Apple poetry prize in Azerbaijan. Her poems have been translated into many languages throughout Europe, and in the UK and US. Translations by Stephen Watts have appeared in journals such as Poetry Review and Modern Poetry Translation and critics and artists across the world have written about her poetry with great admiration. She has read widely in Europe & America & performs her poetry at festivals worldwide. In 2012 she was chosen by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC), Birkbeck, University of London, as a writer whose language epitomises the revolutionary power of poetry when faced by the crises of our lives in the contemporary world.

(2020)