Ahmad Shamloo (December 11, 1925 – August 2, 1990), pen-named A. Bamdad and A. Sobh, was a poet, screenwriter, journalist, researcher, translator, lexicographer, and one of the secretaries of the Iranian Writers’ Association. He was the founder of a poetic form called Sepid poetry, which was considered a development in modern Persian poetry after Nimai’s poetry, and is therefore called the father of Sepid Persian poetry.
Shamloo did not have a regular school education because his father was an army officer and was constantly assigned from city to city. For this reason, his family was never able to stay in one place for long. His imprisonment in 1943 for political activities marked the end of that irregular education.
Shamloo’s main fame is for his innovation in contemporary Persian poetry and for composing a type of poetry known as white poetry, prose poetry, or Shamlooi poetry, which is still considered one of the most important poetic formats used in Iran and was influenced by French white poetry. Shamloo, who considered every idealist poet to be ultimately a complete and total anarchist, met Nima Yushij in 1946 and, under his influence, turned to Nimai’s poetry. However, for the first time in the poem “Until the Red Blossom of a Shirt,” published in 1949 under the name “White Poetry of Forgiveness,” he abandoned meter and pioneered a new style in contemporary Persian poetry. “The First Night of Great Iranian Poetry” was organized for Ahmad Shamloo in 1968 by the cultural attaché of the German Embassy in Tehran.