Athena Farrokhzad

The work of poet, playwright, translator and literary critic Athena Farrokhzad boils with rage, but it also resonates with concern, as one constantly gives way to the other. She believes that stories are the only legacy that really matters. Family therefore plays a key role in her work, as in her extraordinary collection White Blight, in which a family confronts the past in conversations about memories, revenge and language. In the poem Letter to a Warrior, written to her unborn daughter, Farrokhzad considers what it means to create new life, to feel it in you and to contemplate the lives that went before. Rage is also a dominant emotion in Europe, Where Have You Misplaced Love?, a collection of poems that can be read as a call to action to take better care of each other. Above all, however, they remind us never to stop telling stories.