Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh was born in 1976 in Tehran, the capital of the then Kingdom of Iran, two years before the Iranian Revolution transformed the country into an Islamic Republic. He attended primary and ‘guidance’ school in his birthplace and produced his first public writing – a simplified prose version of an episode of the early medieval epic Shah-Nameh (Book of Kings) – at 13, winning a young adults’ literary award, and becoming the subject of a documentary film for Iran’s national television.

Only months after, Ali’s family immigrated from the oppressive, war-torn country to sunny Queensland; but his high school years were marred by his classmates’ racism, and the tribulations of learning English, which concluded with his enrolling in the Creative Arts Program at Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, in 1995. It was during these studies that he completed the experimental narrative poem, 'eliXir: a story in poetry', which become his first book of poetry. He then went on obtain his PhD from Deakin University in Melbourne.

Alizadeh has had his poetic works published in over forty Literary Journals and anthologies, and has published six more books since obtaining his Phd including; Eyes in Times of War (Salt Publishing, 2006), Fifty Poems of Attar in association with Kenneth Avery (re.press, 2007), a tragic love story The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008),Iran: My Grandfather, a creative non-fiction work (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2010), the poetry collection Ashes in the Air (University of Queensland Press, 2011) and Transactions (University of Queensland Press, 2013). 

Now living in Melbourne, Ali Alizadeh is a contributing editor for the literary journal Cordite Poetry Review, one of the editors of VLAK: Poetics and the Arts, and a contributor to Overland. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Monash University. 

Click the link to watch Ali read out his poem "the Lecture last night"

Click the link to watch Ali read out his poem "Fetish Commodity"