Ekhtesari, Fatemeh

Fatemeh Ekhtesari (c) Linda Bournane Engelberth Aschehoug

Fatemeh Ekhtesari, born in Kashmar, Iran, in 1986, is a poet, writer, and freelance filmmaker. She serves as the editor of the “Iranian Independent Literature Magazine” an online literary publication. In 2013, Ekhtesari faced imprisonment at Evin Prison but was later released on bail. In 2015, she received a sentence of 11.5 years of imprisonment and 99 lashes. As a result, she escaped Iran, initially seeking refuge in Turkey, later arriving in Norway with the assistance of ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network). Since 2017 she has been residing in Norway, where she has published two bilingual books of poetry since, “نمی مانیم / Vi overlever ikke” (TransFe:r 2020, translated into Norwegian by Nina Zandjani, Eng.: We don’t survive) and ”زن نیست / Hun er ikke kvinne” (Aschehoug 2022, translated into Norwegian by Fatemeh Ekhtesari, Mohammad M. Izadi, Johanne Fronth-Nygren, Eng.: She is not a woman).

Festival Content

POETRY TALK: FATEMEH EKHTESARI & MARIAM MEETRA

my name: …

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets 

The experience of living in exile and fleeing from a system that especially oppresses women is something poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mariam Meetra share. After being sentenced to eleven and a half years in prison plus 99 lashes, the poet, author, and activist Fatemeh Ekhtesari (born 1986 in Kashmar, Iran) fled her home country and has been living in Norway since 2017. There, she published two bilingual volumes, زنده نمی مانیم  / Vi overlever ikke (TransFe:r 2020, translated by Nina Zandjani) and زن نیست / Hun er ikke kvinne (Aschehoug 2022, translated by Fatemeh Ekhtesari, Mohammad M. Izadi, and Johanne Fronth-Nygren). Fatemeh Ekhtesari is a member of “Postmodern Ghazal,” the most radical poetic movement in contemporary Iranian literature. In her poems, she updates traditional forms of Persian poetry, such as the ghazal, in the context of Iran’s socially and politically violent present.

In her first volume of poetry in Persian and German Ich habe den Zorn des Windes gesehen (Wallstein Verlag 2023 translated into German by Ali Abdollahi, Susanne Baghestani, Sylvia Geist, and Kurt Scharf), the poet Mariam Meetra (born 1992 in Baghlan, Afghanistan) describes the (inner) toil of exile: the liberation from the restrictions of Afghan society on the one hand, and the longing for Kabul and the feeling of being uprooted on the other. A leitmotif running through these poems is the wind as a symbol of this ambivalence: “The wind severs my roots / And blows them wherever it wants / It plants them in the breast of long winters / In gardens without sunshine.”

Ekhtesari, Fatemeh • Meetra, Mariam

WELTKLANG

Night of Poetry

Betonhalle | 15/10 € Anthology included Tickets

This summer, we are celebrating a night of poetry for the 25th time in Berlin. According to the annals of the capital’s media, the first edition on Potsdamer Platz in 2000 coincided with the sudden onset of a summer cold spell. It was way too dark to read into the anthology, and yet an enthusiastic audience held out until two in the morning.

Opposed to that night’s mythological inception at the turn of the millennium, there are not only warm rooms at Weltklang, but also reading lamps. Since 2023, German and English translations of all the poems read have been published in an anthology that is traditionally limited to people in attendance.

The eight poets from different parts of the world who are taking the stage this evening will read and perform in their original languages, showcasing the intensities that poetry can generate not only in silent reading but also in the spoken word, in the concentration of a poetic voice.

Brassinga, Anneke • Chingonyi, Kayo • CAConrad • Ekhtesari, Fatemeh • Hwang, Yuwon • Kandé, Sylvie • Kiyanovska, Marianna • Vlada, Miruna