Distinguished scholar and translator Donald Rayfield details his ethical objections to accepting a lifetime achievement award from Georgia’s Writers’ House. This is a slightly edited version of the speech he delivered at the March 2025 ceremony.

In this Fahmida Riaz poem, the police come looking for incendiary material and find a writer’s blazing vision instead.

The official briefing said, “The family has no objection to the findings”

The songs are part of our lives in the chars. They have been passed down to us and adapted through generations and are a testament to how life and religion become one in the everyday.

New incarnations of resistance are forming and reforming every day, stronger than ever before, so I do not want to suggest that things are coming to an end for the Iranian people opposing the regime.