About me

My name is Azadeh and I live in Amsterdam.

Initially I started building this website to share my poems. As I was born in Iran, my love for poetry is not really surprising. Most Iranians grow up with poetry and it is almost like food or oxygen to us. It happens that in my big family, the person most passionate about literature and poetry was my grandmother. Even at the age of 90 (the last time I saw her alive), she was still reciting poems from classical Persian poets (sorry for the background noise, Iranians are very loud:):

This is a quatrain by Omar Khayyam. Loosely translated:

Oh friend, let us not worry about tomorrow

Let’s cherish these fleeting moments

Tomorrow when we will leave this old world

We will join those who left seven thousand years ago

Although I left Iran as a child and didn’t get to spend much time with my grandma, my interest and love for poetry grew as strong as hers. First, I started reading Persian poetry but soon I discovered poets from other countries as well, such as Pablo Neruda and Nazım Hikmet.

I wasn’t intending to write poetry myself but I started doing so in 2014, which helped me process traumatic events and emotional pain. Gradually, as my wounds started to heal, the topic of my poems shifted from pain and loss to joy, love and the things I was noticing and experiencing around me. Some of my inspiration also comes from movies, books and other creative content.

You may notice that I write in several languages (Farsi, Dutch, English, Spanish and Turkish). Next to my love for poetry, I also happen to love languages (some more than others:) and although I don’t speak all of  the above languages fluently, I have learned and been using them in some way or other. My poems are inspirations that come to my mind in one of these languages, so I don’t consciously decide in which language to write a poem. On the website, you can find the poems in the original written language along with a translated version in English (translated by myself).

While building the website, I realised that there was more that I wanted to share. With my love for photography, design, street art and the natural environment, I decided to also share my photos, the street art in my neighbourhood and other places, (landscape) architecture and urban design projects, garden design, and articles that I write related to environmental issues and sustainability.

I hope the content I share will inspire you, inform you or help you in some other way in your life.

If you have any questions/comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via the contact page. And if you want me to keep you updated, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter.