Darius Sepehri

Darius Sepehri was born in Iran and moved to Australia at the age of five. He has an abiding passion for Persianate culture and poetry as well as for English and world poetry, writing, film, religions, art history, philosophy, and the natural world. He is a researcher and writer at the University of Sydney in the Department of International and Comparative Literary Studies, where he is completing a doctoral thesis. He has published translations of Hafez, on whom he plans to continue working, and a long essay on the influence of Persian poetry on Judith Wright in Southerly.

He placed second in the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize for his essay 'To Speak of Sorrow'.

Darius Sepehri reviews 'The Shahnameh: The Persian epic as world literature' by Hamid Dabashi

May 2019, no. 411 • 22 April 2019

Not many peoples are able to read poems in their language written one thousand years ago, as Persian speakers in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan do today with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, meaning the ‘Book of Kings’. The Shahnameh is Iran’s national epic, a vast compilation of pre-Islamic Iranian myths, legends, and imperial history. The summa of the life of Hakim Abol-Qasem Tusi, known by his ... (read more)

Darius Sepehri reviews 'Axiomatic' by Maria Tumarkin

September 2018, no. 404 • 03 September 2018

The third chapter of Axiomatic, ‘History Repeats Itself’, displays Maria Tumarkin’s gifts for threading the subjects of her interviews through personal questions and existential interrogations. Seen through Tumarkin’s eyes, Vanda, an indefatigable community lawyer, fights for her clients inside court and out – those trapped in addiction, the mentally ill, streetworkers. Vanda’s compass ... (read more)

Loving Vincent

ABR Arts • 30 October 2017

Vincent van Gogh called homes ‘human nests’, and in Auvers-sur-Oise it was a nest he was after, to regain his poise through work and rest. Loving Vincent, a Polish–English co-production, spends most of its time in Auvers, where Vincent died an arduous death in 1890, but begins in Arles, where Vincent made friends such as postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), whose son, Armand Roulin (Dougl ... (read more)

'To Speak of Sorrow' by Darius Sepehri

August 2017, no. 393 • 26 July 2017

‘I still have grief inside me, no matter how long my people’s been gone. I still have that grief, and tear, and rip in my heart like it happened yesterday ... Even alherntere, non-Indigenous people can feel it.’ Margaret Kemarre Turner,Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means to Be an Aboriginal Person (2010) Tehran, April 1987: Going UnderDescending in a stream of arpeggio broken chords: as we move ... (read more)