Forugh Farrokhzad was born in capital on 28 December 1934, to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad (the Farrokhzad family hail from Tafresh) and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar. The fourth of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydoun, Pooran, Gloria), she attended school until the ninth grade, then was taught painting and sewing at a girls’ school for the manual arts. At the age of 16, she was married to satirist Parviz Shapour. She continued her education with painting and sewing classes and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. Her only child, a son named Kamyar Shapour (subject of The Return), was born a year later.
Farrokhzad was born into a middle-class family and displayed a passion for art and literature from an early age. Married young, she soon faced personal and social challenges, including divorce, which deeply influenced her writing. Her early collections of poetry, such as The Captive (1955), The Wall (1956), and Rebellion (1958), expressed raw emotions of confinement and yearning, resonating with many readers while also sparking controversy in conservative circles.
