iran: woman, life, freedom زن، زندگی، آزادی Term 1

Iranian-born, Persian Kamancheh and Qeychak player, singer, songwriter and Choir director Gelareh Pour (she/her), studied her BA at the Art University of Tehran's conservatorium, and her Masters of Ethnomusicology at The University of Melbourne. Gelareh released her debut album 'Tanin-e Melbourne' in 2013, and her third full-length album, MNMM, on Nov 2018.  Gelareh's group Garden released their latest record in May 2020, during Melbourne's lockdown. This album is both audio and video, recorded live at Melbourne's Bakehouse Studios.

(she/her) is a multi-award-winning journalist scholar and poet. She teaches at the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and University of Canberra and writes for The Guardian on the narratives of displacement.  Saba is the Red Room Poetry’s Writing in Resistance editor. Her report on the gendered harms of detention won the Premier's Multicultural Communications Awards. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Transnational Literature, Wasafiri Magazine of International Contemporary Writing (UK), Cordite Poetry, Australian Poetry, and the Art Gallery of NSW. She is the chief editor of Borderless, A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry. She was twice a judge for the Dolatabadi Book Prize for the Best Book on Women's Literature and Women's Issues and the BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize. Saba is a member of The Women in Refugee Law Network in the UK, an honorary advisor for the Indigo Foundation and an honorary member of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia Inc.

Her documentary films have been screened by the BBC, the UN, Amnesty International, Copenhagen Film Festival, the Seen and Heard Film Festival, the Human Rights Film Festival, the Exile Films Festival, and at UCLA among many other special screenings around the world. She was a member of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters and also worked as a researcher for the International Campaign for Human Rights based in New York. Her op-eds are published by outlets such as the BBC, Associated Press, Daily Life, SBS, BuzzFeed, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

(she/her) is an exiled journalist and refugee living in Melbourne. She is the author of the Enlightenment of The Greengage Tree, which has been nominated for the Booker International Prize, Pen, Stella Prize and National Awards. This story is based on the true story of the Executions of Summer 1988 in Iran.  

She has just finished her second novel, The Goukaran Tree of Our Kitchen, based on the true story of The Chaine Murderer of the Islamic Regime of Iran.

(she/her) is a British-Australian scholar of Islam and the Middle East. In 2018 she was detained following a visit to Iran to attend an academic conference and served more than two years of a ten-year sentence before being freed in November 2020 in a prisoner exchange deal negotiated by the Australian government. She is the author of the 2022 memoir The Uncaged Sky.