Tehran
I was born in Tehran in 1988. From a very young age, I discovered I had a flare for literature, especially story–telling and poetry. This flare was encouraged by my mother who was a philosopher. She’d often read Greek mythology to me until I learned to read at the age of eight. I was nine when I wrote my first poem in my mother tongue, roughly translated as ‘The River of Ignorance’. My older sister started teaching me English and introduced me to English literature. I fell in love with the English language. My mother’s and sister’s favourite author, Iris Murdoch, became one of my favourite writers.
I did my diploma in Maths and Physics but loathed every second of it. I knew I was destined to study literature. Like most other Iranian 18-year-olds I had to take the National Entrance Examination in order to see what major and what university would accept me. I only participated in the entrance exam for language and literature with the aim of studying Russian Literature at university. After reading the Persian translation of ‘Laughter in the Dark’, and pretty much everything by Pushkin that had been translated into Farsi, I thought I wanted to learn Russian and read Russian Literature in the original language. I did well in the National Entrance Exam and I could study English Language and Literature in my dream university, Shahid Beheshti.
Becoming an English literature student in one of Iran’s top university changed me and my life for good. It was there that I fell in love for the first time, and it occurred to me that I don’t really like the societal norms. At university I had my own beautiful bubble. It was there that I was taught the poetry of T.S. Eliot which made me want to write poetry in English. It was there that I became friends with many gay people and realised I was queer. It was there that I wrote my first novel in Farsi and didn’t show it to anyone apart from my mother. The novel contained quite a few sex scenes between a young woman and a married man, so I didn’t even think for a moment it would obtain the necessary permission for publication. During this time, I also wrote a collection of poetry in Farsi called ‘The Earthquake in the Ruins of Mind’. As you can tell by the title, it was pretty bad and now I consider myself lucky that it didn’t receive permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, who considered it ‘immoral’. However, this experience made me realise if I wanted to become a published author, this could not happen in Iran as my writing dealt with sexuality and queerness.
After I graduated from Shahid Beheshti University, I realised with a degree as useless as literature I could only become a teacher, I wanted to become a published author. Meanwhile, my father was relentlessly encouraging me to do an MA. I applied to do an MA in English Literature in Canada as my older brother with whom I had always been close was doing his PhD there. This was when I had an epiphany that Shahid Beheshti that was the world to me meant nothing in the world. Outside Iran, nobody had heard of it. I had written a story about two men painting each other whilst having sex, which I posted on my anonymous blog. Some of my blog fans said it was so good it made them weep. It also got published in an underground online magazine. I translated this story into English and submitted an application to study Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. When they called me in Tehran from Birkbeck, I could not believe that they wanted me.
Moving to London to study Creative Writing altered my life for good. I grew up, became confident, found my voice, and my territory. But above everything, I became a survivor. I have had quite a few traumas since I moved to London, including being stalked, bullied, and losing my mother.
My debut poetry collection Sorrows of the Sun was published in 2017 by Skyscraper under the pseudonym Sogol Sur.
Sogol, like my real first name, is also a Persian middle-class female name, meaning fresh new flower. Golnoosh means ‘nectar of the flower’. My mother chose Golnoosh because Golnoosh was the name of a famous Iranian pianist whom my mother liked: Golnoosh Khaleghi. Sur means ‘feast’ and rhymes with Nour which means ‘light’. Most people who don’t know Farsi just call me Gol.
Whilst working on my PhD thesis with the title of ‘The Iranian Queer’, I also teach at Birkbeck and translate modernist Persian poetry and queer flash fictions into English.
You can read one of the sapphic short stories here, An evening of Martyrdom, recently featured on the Granta website.