Biography
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 during the Iran-Iraq War and its immediate aftermath; and, having taken an early interest in books and literature, 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 world capsized as his family immigrated from the oppressive, war-torn country; and his high school years in Queensland, Australia, marred by his classmates’ racism, difficulties of adapting to a mostly hostile environment, and the tribulations of learning English; concluded with his enrolling in the Creative Arts Program at Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, in 1995.
Ali’s experience as a Creative Writing student at Griffith was formative: influenced by new friends and popular ‘grunge’ music, he began writing ‘performance poems’ and reading them at pubs and student gatherings; then, after accepting an offer to do his Honours at the same university, he produced an experimental ‘rhizomic’ narrative poem titled eliXir: a story in poetry, his first book.
Ali then moved to Melbourne to study for his PhD at Deakin University, went on to complete his thesis, an exploration and redefinition of epic poetry titled ‘La Pucelle: the Epic of Joan of Arc’, in 2004; while publishing poems and other writings in local and national literary journals, and winning the Verandah magazine’s 2000 Literary Award for the long poem ‘Princess’. Among other works of this period: poetry-film collaboration with director Bill Mousoulis, A Sufi Valentine; and the poem ‘Rumi’, first performed at La Mama Theatre, published in the literary journal Going Down Swinging, featured on ABC television’s Sunday Arts program in 2007, included in The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry in 2008, and described by Jaya Savige in a review in The Australian as a “wonderful poem [that] resonates unnervingly with the Australian landscape”.
Ali has also had poetry, poetry translations and poetry reviews published in literary journals such as Overland, HEAT, Southerly, Kalimat, The Warwick Review, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Famous Reporter, Divan, Cordite Poetry Review, Stylus Poetry Journal, turnrow, Red Weather, Voiceworks and Woorilla; The Age newspaper; and anthologies such as Culture Is… Australian Stories Across Cultures, Said the Rat!, The Best Australian Poems 2008, Contemporary Australian Poetry in Chinese Translation, and Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia. Ali’s poem in the last anthology, ‘Listening to Michael Jackson in Tehran’, has been described by Kerry Leves in a review in the Overland magazine as “a cross-cultural tour de force which puts sociality – as opposed to, say, clashing fundamentalisms – front-row-centre”.
Since being awarded his PhD in Professional Writing, Ali has published three more books: a collection of poems articulating perceptions shaped by violence, Eyes in Times of War (Salt Publishing, 2006); with Kenneth Avery, translations of mystical poems of a Sufi master, Fifty Poems of Attar (re.press, 2007); and the novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008 ), a tragic love story set during the Iran-Iraq War. Having decided to leave Australia in search of creative emancipation and inspiration, he lived in China for two years until 2007, then in Turkey for another year, before moving to Dubai where he currently lives with his wife Penelope and son Jasper, and teaches writing and literature. Ali is the reviews editor for the literary journal Cordite Poetry Review.
