This week’s entry into the ever-expanding WRITE BRAIN TV Radical Library is a literary maverick who personified the foaming tides of the cresting New Wave; poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad.

The Persian literary canon, nearly exclusive to poetry until the 20th Century, is unfathomably vast and endlessly beautiful. This rich legacy was re-invigorated in the 1950’s and 1960’s as a young generation of artist were coming of age during a tumultuous time in their country’s history. As with all artistic movements, it was these very trials and tribulations that seeded the radical spirit that would come to define the Iranian New Waves, both in literature and film.

Forugh Farrokhzad found herself at the nexus of these surging creative movements, but not before her own personal hardships. Farrokhzad married at age 16 and soon gave birth to her only child. However, the marriage ended in divorce, and it was Farrokhzad’s extramarital affairs and career independence that were given as reason when she subsequently lost custody of her son. Devastated and emotionally frail, Farrokhzad was institutionalized in 1955, the same year as the publication of her first collection of poetry.

Farrokhzad both published poetry and made films throughout the 60’s, cultivating a reputation as a fiercely radical renaissance woman with a distinctive feminine voice, a reputation that in fact saw her works banned for almost a decade following the overthrow of Iran’s monarchy in 1979.