Maryam Ala Amjadi Biography

Maryam Ala Amjadi, born in 1984 in Tehran, is a young poet, translator and essayist who has spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India. Her first book of poems Me, I and Myself was published by TehranSeda Publications in 2003. Ala Amjadi who writes in English was the winner of the Silver Medal in the 14th National Persian Literature Olympiad (2001) and was awarded Honorary Fellowship in Creative Writing by the International Writers Program (IWP) at University of Iowa, U.S.A. (Fall 2008) . She has also won the Second Prize (on Gender issues in Translation) in the A.K. Ramanujan National Paper Reading Competition, University of Baroda, India (January 2009) and is also the translator of the American poet, Raymond Carver's poetry in a collection entitled, Fear of Arriving Early (Aknoon Publications, Tehran 2009) . A Member of the Young Scholars Club in Tehran and World Poets Society (W.P.S) , she has also previously worked as a Persian-English News Interpreter at the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) .

She has an M.A. in English Literature from University of Pune. Ala Amjadi’s second book of poems Gypsy Bullets was published by Prafullata Publications (India) in January 2010. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian and Romanian.

In September 2011, she won the 'Young Generation Poet' Award in the 1st International Poetry Festival in Yinchuan, China. Presently, she is a writer for the Tehran Times Daily and writes the 'Lifestyle' page every Sunday.