Rosa Jamali
Rosa Jamali studied drama at the Tehran University of Art; later she received an MA degree in English literature from the University of Tehran. 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. In the 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 Persian poetry critics, she has perceived new landscapes in a kind of imagery and as Britannica says she has experimented new styles of expression in Persian poetry.