Mehdi Mousavi will read from his latest Persian/English poetry collection, The Last Kiss and participate in a roundtable discussion with translator Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Senior Lecturer in Persian Samad Alavi.
The Last Kiss brings together poems that reflect on the lives of ordinary people in Iran and the consequences faced by those who resist repression. The collection moves between the brutality of imprisonment, censorship and political violence, and the more intimate experiences of fear, loss, love and everyday life under an authoritarian system.
The book also explores exile: the pain of leaving one’s country, the distance from family and language, and the difficulty of building a new life in an unfamiliar place. Written across different periods of Mousavi’s life, the poems connect political events with personal experience, showing how repression, resistance and displacement are lived at an individual level.
Mehdi Mousavi is an Iranian poet, writer and cultural activist, and a leading figure in contemporary Persian poetry. He is the founder of Iran’s Postmodern Ghazal movement, which brought contemporary social and political themes into dialogue with classical Persian poetic forms. His writing challenged both literary conventions and the restrictions imposed on artistic expression in Iran, while his underground poetry workshops helped influence a generation of younger Iranian writers.
Mousavi’s work became closely associated with the cultural dissent surrounding Iran’s Green Movement. He faced years of censorship and harassment before being arrested in 2013 and imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where he spent 38 days in solitary confinement and underwent intensive interrogation. He was subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison on charges including “insulting sanctities” and “propaganda against the state”, as well as 99 lashes for shaking hands with members of the opposite sex. His case prompted an international campaign by writers and human rights organisations, including PEN.
After his sentence was upheld, Mousavi fled Iran. He eventually came to Norway in 2017 as an ICORN City of Refuge writer and settled in Lillehammer. He remains an active cultural voice for Iranian audiences, continuing to write and speak about the experiences of ordinary people in Iran and drawing attention to censorship, political repression, executions and human rights abuses. His work continues to circulate among Persian-speaking readers despite restrictions on its publication in Iran.
Mousavi has published extensively in Persian and his work has been translated into numerous languages. His most recent collection, The Last Kiss, is a bilingual Persian–English collection published in Norway by Sic Publishing, bringing together poems concerned with protest, imprisonment, exile, belonging and life in contemporary Iran.
The English translation of The Last Kiss was developed over two years through a close collaboration between Iranian writer and poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Dr Samuel Tongue of the Scottish Poetry Library.
Ekhtesari, who has herself experienced censorship and imprisonment in Iran, brought an intimate understanding of the cultural, political and literary context of Mousavi’s work. Working with Tongue, she examined the poems in detail to uncover their layers of meaning, imagery, wordplay and cultural references. Their goal was to recreat these rich and multilayered poems in English without losing the character of the originals.
The process involved countless long online sessions as well as intensive in-person workshops in Norway and Scotland. Rather than translating the poems word for word, the aim was to understand what each poem was doing in Persian and recreate that experience as faithfully as possible for an English-language reader.
The event is supported by the publisher Sic Publishing AS (Lillehammer)