Rosa Jamali


Rosa Jamali, is an Iranian poet, translator, literary critic and playwright.

Education and career

She studied Drama at the Tehran University of Art; later she received an MA degree in English Literature from Tehran University.
Her debut collection of poems, "This Dead Body is Not an Apple, It Is Either a Cucumber or a Pear", was published in 1997 and announced a major new voice in Iranian poetry. The book opened Persian poetry to new creative possibilities. That same year her second collection of poems "Making a Face" was published and well-received by critics. This collection, with its stream-of-consciousness narrative poems, merged different types of discourses and registers – sometimes archaic, sometimes colloquial, written, formal, informal, journalistic, scientific. Jamali adapted a kind of music from classical Persian poetry and imbued it with the natural cadences of speech, juxtaposing long and short sentences, infusing the whole with her bitter and distinctive sense of humour. Her third collection "Making Coffee To Run a Crime Story" was partly inspired by Sadegh Hedayat’s Blind Owl. Her most recent books are "The Hourglass is Fast Asleep" and "Highways Blocked", which have been mentioned for combining present-day setting with the myths and themes of Persian mystics.
According to a Persian poetry critic, she has perceived new landscapes in a kind of imagery and as Britannica says she has experimented new styles of expression in Persian poetry.

Works

Poetry