Writing with Flaming Fingers
Shabnam Azar
February 11, 2016: It was shortly after midnight when emergency services received a call about a car fire. We went to the site and found a car in flames and later a human body in the car. There are grounds to believe it was homicide, says Linda Pleym, spokeswoman for the Malmö police.
The Iranian poet Sohrab Rahimi had been living in Sweden as a political migrant since 1986. Approximately two years after his death, the circumstances are still unclear. How can we approach the dying of a poet? How can we breathe into the fire?
Shabnam Azar
Shabnam Azar (*1977) is an Iranian poet, journalist and artist currently based in London. She studied journalism at the Centre for Media Studies and Research in Tehran until 2003. In 2011, she moved to Cologne, where she studied Media Arts at the Academy of Media Arts since 2015. She has so far published four volumes of poetry. In her artistic work, she examines critical and poetic aspects of contemporary characters. Azar has earned several prizes for her journalistic and literary work. She has been invited to take part in exhibitions, readings and performances in Tehran, Berlin, Gothenburg, Paris, Malmo, Cologne, Halabja, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg.
