Maryam Hooleh, Iranian poet ,writer,jurnalist and human rights activist, the winner of PEN Prise (2003-Sweden), was born in 1978 in Tehran to a Kurdish family and began her career in literary activism at the age of thirteen. In 1999, an Iranian film-maker living in the United States made a movie called "Tavalodi Digar" (Another Birth) of Hooleh’s life, her illegal trip to Greece (in 1998), and her poetry that was the center of attention on satellite television stations worldwide for months and later made available in VHS form. Her first book, Badbadak Hargez az Dastha-ye Man Parvaz Nakhahad KardUnited States by Midland Graphics in February 2000 (A Balloon Will Never Fly From My Hands), was published in the United States by Midland Graphics in February 2000. Dar Kuche-haye Aten (In the Streets of Athens) is her only book that has been published in Iran and contains poetry from her year in Athens. In protest of printing and publication difficulties and censorship in Iran, Maryam Hooleh took refuge for one month in Daneshju Park, across from the City Theater, which is one of the most famous centers for art and culture in Iran. Tens of other poets joined in her act of protest. In 2001, she was invited to Japan by the Foundation for Women Researchers, and traveled to Sweden, where she published Baje-i Nefrin (The Box Office Curse). In 2003, she received a yearly fellowship from the Swedish Writers’ Society http://www.maniha.com http://gozaar.orghttp://www.iranian.com. She is presently living in Sweden and runs the internet site Maniha, dedicated to underground Persian poetry and literature, with Hooman Azizihttp://www.maniha.com/hooman.azizi.html . To date she has published seven books and collections of poetry in Persian and her poetries has been translated to English, Swedish, Kurdish, French, Dutch(Netherland),…

If you want to know more about her work, in " Gozaar ,A Forum on Human Rights and Democracy in Iran" ,which is an online magazine, Mahmoud Khoshchehreh has an article about her poetry: Poetry of Maryam Hooleh ,A Thorn in the Side of the Islamic Republic .Iranian politics has always been precarious, and changing dictatorial regimes have flagrantly violated the most essential human rights. Iranian writers, novelists, and poets have often played crucial roles in demystifying these tyrannical forces and bringing to light their infringements on freedom. Recognizing the disruptive and liberating potential these writers can generate by speaking truth, the Islamic Republic of Iran has systematically silenced their powerful and dissenting voices. We remember the murders of the writer, poet, and critic Mohammad Mokhtari and the writer and translator Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh by the very conservative forces that have now gathered behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad’s government. One could, perhaps, expect more deadly assaults on Iranian writers in the coming days, but many of these writers have also demonstrated immense courage in defending basic human freedoms. Maryam Hooleh, a young Iranian Kurd and one of the most gifted poets of her generation who now lives in Sweden, is one of these writers who--for some time now--have turned into thorns in the side of the Iranian regime. The profoundly uninhibited and confrontational style of Hooleh’s poetry has daringly exposed the crude disregard of the Islamic regime for human life. It has also drawn attention to the bodies of women, the most manifest objects of repression by the regime. At the same time, this confrontational style can provide ammunition for a damaging assault on the mullahs’ regime. Within Maryam Hooleh’s poetry, the entire cultural framework upheld by the Islamic Republic disintegrates. For one thing, Hooleh breaks out of the confines of a religiously laden masculine discourse and its deifying paraphernalia of state-sponsored female qualities such as “virtue,” and “shame.” Instead, her poetry overflows with an arsenal of scandalous obscenities that, at every opportunity, debunks the rigid morality of a theocratic patriarchy. In this sense, Hooleh’s world is animated by a carnivalesque sense that throws into disarray all autocratic religious rhetoric. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his monumental study of the oeuvres of Rabelais, entitled Rabelais and His World, celebrates the concept of carnivalbecause, in its evocation of a grotesque body and its affirmation of this body’s protuberances and apertures, it emancipates the body and allows it to outgrow itself. The body’s orifices are the passageways that connect it to the world and propel it to overcome the barriers that have separated the individual body from “the body of the world.” In other words, these orifices are points of entrance into the world and signposts of initiation into selfhood. As evidenced in this passage from her poem, “Kiosk of Damnation (Nietzsche in Kurdish Pants)cursed booth,2001 Baran poblisher, sweden,” Hooleh’s poetry alternately weaves its texture through a string of allusions to her trampled gender and sexuality as it vividly conjures up the horrifying experience of being a woman in Iran.The Poetry of Maryam Hooleh ,A Thorn in the Side of the Islamic Republic