Ahmad Shamloo was born on December 11, 1925, at house number 134, Safi-Alishah Street, Tehran, to a father named Heydar (originally from the village of Shamloo, 20 kilometers from Tabriz, after the Khajeh district, and descended from Ismail Mirza Safavi) and a mother named Kakab. According to Shamloo in the poem “I Have Finally Risen…” from the collection of meaningless eulogies, his mother Kakab Shamloo was a Caucasian immigrant who was forcibly relocated to Iran with her family during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
Because of his father’s job as an officer in Reza Shah’s army, he spent his childhood in cities such as Rasht, Semirom, Isfahan, Abadeh, and Shiraz whenever he was on duty. His family moved frequently, leading to inconsistencies in his education. He spent his elementary school years in the cities of Khash, Zahedan, Mashhad, Birjand, and the village of Shamlu (20 kilometers from Tabriz, after the Khajeh district). From the age of twelve to thirteen, he began recording common words that were not recorded in official dictionaries.
He completed his high school education in Birjand, Mashhad, Gorgan, and Tehran, attending Iranshahr High School and Firouz Bahram High School in Tehran. Eager to learn German, he enrolled in the first year of the Iran-Germany Industrial Conservatory. In the early 1940s, his father was sent to Gorgan and the Turkmen Sahara to organize the disintegrated gendarmerie organization. He went to Gorgan with his family and was forced to continue his education in the third grade of high school. During World War II and the entry of the Allies into Iranian soil, he participated in political activities against the Allies in the north of the country, was later arrested in Tehran, and transferred to the Soviet prison in Rasht. After his release from prison, he went with his family to Rezaieh (Urumiyah) and began his fourth grade of high school. When the Azerbaijan Democratic Party and the Pishevari sect came to power, he was arrested along with his father and was held in front of a firing squad for two hours until he received an assignment from higher authorities. He was finally released and returned to Tehran, where he dropped out of school for good and worked in a bookstore.