“Fereydoun Farrokhzad always mesmerized me,” says Hooman Askary, a former BBC Monitoring, BBC Persian and BBC World correspondent now at RFE/RL. Ten to 11 years ago, Askary was asked to produce a radio package to mark the anniversary of Farrokhzad’s death and came into contact with his siblings, Mehrdad and Pooran. “The more I talked to people, the more the story captivated me. I put it aside and didn’t focus on it, but every time I found something new, I saved it and took notes.” Pooran passed away in 2016, Mehrdad in December 2018. Fereydoun’s other sister Forough Farrokhzad, a celebrated feminist poet, had died in a car crash aged 33 in 1967, long before the Islamic Revolution.
