Pegāh Ahmadi (Persian پگاه احمدی) is an Iranian poet, scholar, literary critic and translator of poetry. She is currently the ICORN Guest Writer in Frankfurt City of Refuge.
Ahmadi began writing poetry at the age of seven, and made her début as a poet at age seventeen by the publication of a poem in the literary magazine Takāpu, edited by Mansur Kushān. She has studied Persian literature at the University of Tehran, and regularly contributed to literary magazines on subject matters related to criticism of verse, theoretical issues pertaining to poetry and translation of poems. She is a member of Iranian Writers Association. In 2007 she was awarded the Celebrity of Poetry Award of the Iranian Journalists' Institute.
In the beginning of her literary career, Pegah Ahmadi's poems were associated with linguistic experimentation as was the case with many Iranian poets in the 1990s. But then she took up political and social themes because she considered them to be more relevant. She has especially taken up issues of the history and the changing role of women in society, reflecting also what consequences these changes have for writing as a woman.
Ahmadi has published several books of poetry, anthologies, literary reviews and translation of American poetry (like Sylvia Plath). Before coming to Germany, she worked as editor of the literary review Paperik and taught "Poetry in cinema" at the Film School Tehran.
She says of her own approach to her work:
"There comes a time in your life when sentimentalism can provide no answer to everyday questions. You are confronted by the blackness of your culture and the depth of your history and are compelled to devote attention to the responsibility that society brings with it. Personal experiences and abstract games can no longer match such entities."
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