The twentieth century in Iran was a century of revolutions — constitutional, nationalist, Islamic — and a century of poets who wrote through them.
From the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 through the nationalisation of oil in 1951, the 1979 Revolution, and the Green Movement of 2009 to the Woman Life Freedom uprising of 2022 — Iran's modern history can be read as a sequence of moments in which the public square became the most important room in the country.
Zan, zendegi, āzādi — woman, life, freedom — three words that were, once again, a whole political programme in the grammar of Persian poetry.
Each of those moments produced its own literature: memoirs, slogans, photographs, songs. Read alongside the poetry, modern Iranian history becomes something other than a story of regimes. It becomes a story of a people, in public, again and again, writing themselves into their own future.