Sholeh Wolpé

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-American poet, playwright and literary translator, born in Tehran in 1962. ¹ She writes in English, translates literature from Persian, and is Writer-in-Residence at the University of California, Irvine. ¹

Wolpé was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1962 and lived there until the age of thirteen, when she was sent to Trinidad to live with her aunt and grandmother. ¹ She then attended boarding school at Moira House School in Eastbourne, England, and continued her higher education in the United States, at George Washington University, Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University. ¹ She has lived in Washington DC, Virginia, Chicago, Redlands and Los Angeles. ¹ In 2018 she became the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she now lives with her husband, the sociologist Edward Telles, in Barcelona and Irvine, California, where she is Writer-in-Residence at the University of California, Irvine. ¹

Wolpé has published seven collections of poetry, among them The Scar Saloon (2004), Rooftops of Tehran (2008), Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths (2013), The Outsider (2018) and Abacus of Loss, a memoir in verse (2022), as well as several plays. ¹ Her translation Sin, selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2007), won the Lois Roth Persian Translation Award in 2010, and her translation of Attar's Conference of the Birds (2017) was the first new English rendering of the poem in over thirty years; a further Attar translation, The Invisible Sun, followed in 2025. ¹ She edited and largely translated the anthology The Forbidden, poems from Iran and its exiles (2012), and was regional editor of Tablet and Pen (2010). ¹ Her awards include a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2014 and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Trailblazer honour in 2020. ¹

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