Our Persian Poets’ Tour featured the poetry of five acclaimed poets from three Persian-speaking countries – Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan – in a series of readings and events across the UK, read in translation by their British poet co-translators Jo Shapcott, Nick Laird, Maura Dooley, Mimi Khalvati and Sarah Maguire.

The tour was an extraordinary success: we had capacity audiences (80 people at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; 90 people at the Millennium Library Norwich, and a further 80 at Asia House in London) plus a fantastic article by Christina Patterson in The Independent,an insightful blog post by Gregory Leadbetter on the pleasure of hearing the poems read in their original language and an article by poet Reza Mohammadi, ‘Afghanistan has poetry in its soul’on The Guardian website.

The poets taking part include the London-based Afghan poet, Reza Mohammadi (translated by Nick Laird), as well as two poets new to the PTC, Azita Ghahreman (translated by Maura Dooley) from Iran and Shakila Azizzada (translated by Mimi Khalvati) from Afghanistan.

You can now read all the new poems by Azita, Reza and Shakila that were translated specially for the tour by clicking on each poet’s name, above, and they can also be downloaded or purchased as chapbooks.

We deeply regret that tragic personal circumstances meant that Farzaneh Khojandi (translated by Jo Shapcott) from Tajikistan, who took part in our second World Poets’ Tour in 2008 and Partaw Naderi (translated by Sarah Maguire) from Afghanistan (who participated in the PTC’s first World Poets’ Tour in 2005) were unable to take part in the tour. Their poems were read at all the events in Persian and in English by Jo Shapcott and Sarah Maguire. Our thoughts are with Farzaneh and Partaw, whom we all missed very much indeed.

Persian poetry is rightly famed for the richness of its heritage and many classical Persian poets, such as Rumi and Hafez, are famous across the world. But little is known about how contemporary Persian-language poets have continued to enrich and enliven their tradition, a gap that our forthcoming tour hopes to address.

The Persian language, with local variations, is spoken today in three countries: Afghanistan (Dari), Iran (Farsi) and Tajikistan (Tajik) and our tour will feature poets from each of these countries.

See more details on our Facebook page or subscribe to our newsletter