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In the most well known portrait of her, one of Iran’s most famous poets. She was born in March 1907 to a literary family. Her father,  Yousef Etesami Ashtiani, was a writer and a translator and her grandfather on her mother’s side was a minor poet. She was named Rakhshandeh at birth, but later she adopted the penname of Parvin (Pleiades), changing her name legally.

Many of Etesami’s poems are in the form of  debates, including “The debate between garlic and onion” and “The debate between pea and bean.” Her father taught her Arabic, English and the meters of Persian classic poetry before she started school. Because her father was a National Assembly representative for Tabriz, the provincial capital of Azarbaijan, Parvin Etesami came to know constitutionalists and cultural figures from an early age.

She first studied at Tehran’s American Girls College and continued her education at Iran Bethel School for girls, an American high school established by an American missionary organization in 1874.

She regularly recited children’s poetry for her father’s friends, who always encouraged her.

Etesami’s poems have appeared in primary and middle school textbooks for decades. Her poems express a deep sentiment against injustice and for the victims of tyranny and social injustice.

When she was 28, Parvin Etesami married a cousin of her father, the chief of police in the western provincial capital of Kermanshah, but her temperament was not compatible with the military disposition of her husband. The marriage lasted only nine months and she returned to Tehran.

After the divorce, Etesami’s father agreed to allow her to publish her first book of poems, which received a warm reception from literary figures and critics.

A short while later, she was invited to the new Pahlavi court to receive a Medal of Merit, but she refused to appear at the court or to accept the award. Her brother wrote that Etesami was against the dictatorship and could not have accepted such an invitation.

Parvin’s rejection of the Pahlavi monarchy her to the leaders of the Islamic Republic. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, her collected works were reprinted many times; several biographies have been published about her. A festival and a literary both take her name. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, speaks approvingly about her.

Parvin Etesami died at the age of 34 from typhoid fever in April 1941.

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