Negative of a Group Photograph

Azita Ghahreman is the author of five collections of poetry, Eve’s Songs (1991), Sculptures of Autumn (1995), Forgetfulness is a Simple Ritual (2002), The Suburb of Crows (2008) and Under Hypnosis in Dr Caligari’s Cabinet (2012). In 2013 she was a recipient of Swedish PEN’s Prince Wilhelm Award. Russian and Ukrainian translations of her poems were awarded the Udmurtia Russian Academy’s Ludvig Nobel Prize in 2014. She was born in Mashhad in 1962 and has lived and worked in Sweden since 2006. Her pamphlet, Poems, was published by the Poetry Translation Centre in 2012. Negative of a Group Photograph, a dual-language Farsi-English edition (Farsi title: نگاتیو یک عکس دسته جمعی) translated by Maura Dooley with Elhum Shakerifar, was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2018. Negative of a Group Photograph was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019.

These poems are a wonderful mixture of the bodily, the earthy and the transcendent, the metaphysical; they have lyricism and a sense of elegy and a wonderful sense of defiance.