Jila Mossaed (ژیلا مساعد)

Jila Mossaed

ژیلا مساعد

photo © private

* 04.04.1948, Tehran, Iran
lives in: Gothenburg, Sweden

Jila Mossaed was born in Tehran in 1948. Since she took refuge in Sweden in 1986, she has published a large number of books in Persian exile publishing houses, as well as seven volumes of poetry in Swedish. Her books are banned in Iran and although her poems were only printed in magazines due to censorship there, she is still read in Iran and is even counted among the great poets of the twentieth century.

In Sweden, Mossaed has received many prestigious awards for her poetry, including the Gustav-Fröding Prize, Nordstedt's Author's Grant, a poetry scholarship from the Swedish Academy, and others.
Her works have been translated into many languages. In 2017 an edition of her collected poems was published in Dutch. In 2018 she was appointed a member of the Swedish Academy.

photo © private

In her poems, Jila Mossaed treats exile both as a painful experience and as a possibility of artistic expression, making it possible to deal with the real wounds, those of political and religious oppression. Her poems reflect her survival through words, through poems and her position as a poet and woman. In her poetics, Swedish minimalism meets the opulent, sensual Persian lyric tradition.

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