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Forugh Farrokhzad burst into the public consciousness with a series of poems that sent shockwaves through Persian society in the mid-1950s. Her early poetry focused on the female experience and female desire, overturning \\u2013 in the words of one biographer \\u2013 1,000 years of Persian literature.

Her critics sought to dismiss her skills as a writer by seeing her poetry purely as a confessional outburst of a divorced woman. That attitude has tended to overshadow her achievements, although her private life is so compelling it\\u2019s perhaps inevitable. Since her early death in a car accident, Forugh\\u2019s life and poetry have been inspirational for many Iranians, who see in her an artist who was prepared to defy authority and convention to speak out.

Bridget Kendall is joined by Sholeh Wolp\\xe9, a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. She\\u2019s a poet, playwright, librettist and translator of Forugh\\u2019s work; author Jasmin Darznik, associate professor and chair of the creative writing progamme at California College of the Arts. Her novel, Song of a Captive Bird, is a re-imagining of Forugh\\u2019s life inspired by her poetry, interviews and correspondence; and Levi Thompson, Assistant Professor of Persian and Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He\\u2019s the author of Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry.

Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service

(Photo: Forugh Farrokhzad. Credit: Courtesy of Farrokhzadpoem.com)