Forugh Farrokhzad was born in 1935 to a middle-class family of seven in Tehran, Iran. In a society where women at the time had few rights, she married at seventeen, divorced within three years and was forced to relinquish her only son to her husband. She never remarried, instead pursued an independent lifestyle and a career in poetry. Her expressions of physical and emotional intimacy, much lacking in Persian women's poetry up to that point, placed her at the center of controversy, even among the intellectuals of the time. She was subjected to tabloid gossip and portrayed as a woman of loose moral character. Considered work of great audacity and extraordinary talent, Farrokhzad's poems are today much loved and revered by Iranians, and she is regarded by many as one of the most important female poets in modern Persian literature. On February 14,1967, her car was struck by an American military vehicle in Tehran, killing her instantly. She was 32 years old.

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