Ali Babachahi (; 11 November 1942 – 23 February 2026; 20 Aban 1321 – 4 Esfand 1404 in the Solar Hijri calendar) was an Iranian poet, literary critic, researcher and writer. A recognised figure of modern Persian poetry in the generation after Nima, he became in the 1990s one of the most debated theorists and critics of contemporary Iranian poetry, introducing the notions of "post-Nimaic poetry" (she'r-e pasa-nimai) and, later, "poetry in another situation" (she'r dar vaz'iyat-e digar). He taught literature in Bushehr for about eighteen years and founded the literary magazine Tekapu there in 1967; the magazine was closed under pressure from SAVAK. In October 1977 he read his poems at the in Tehran. After the revolution he was forcibly retired in 1983. For many years he edited the poetry pages of the monthly . He was a member of the Writers' Association of Iran and one of the passengers of the coach that was meant to be driven into a ravine during the 1996 Armenia bus incident. His collection ("This Mysterious Ship") was named in 2016 joint winner of the first Ahmad Shamlou Poetry Prize. He published more than thirty books of poetry, criticism and research.
Biography Childhood and youth Ali Babachahi was born on 11 November 1942 in Kangan, in Bushehr province, and spent his childhood in the village of Jofreh. He was the youngest child of his family. By his own account, his first contact with poetry came through a pedlar who sold halva and books in the lanes of Jofreh, among them Mush-o gorbeh ("The Mouse and the Cat") by Obeid Zakani. Through his brothers he also came to know the political books of the Tudeh Party and magazines such as Omid-e Iran, Sepid-o siah and Roshanfekr.
He attended secondary school in Bushehr, where he was a pupil of Manouchehr Atashi and of Mohammad-Reza Nematizadeh; he later regarded the latter as decisive in shaping his poetic sensibility. According to his account, at the age of thirteen or fourteen he read Atashi a poem entitled "Baran" ("Rain"), and Atashi asked him to read it to the class; he saw this episode as "the beginning of the adventure that made him a poet". He won first place in the literary competition for secondary-school pupils in Bushehr and then in Shiraz, and by the end of secondary school his first poems were appearing under the pen name "A. Faryad" in the magazines Omid-e Iran and Zan-e ruz. After one of his poems was chosen by Omid-e Iran as the "best poem of the week", he began publishing under his own name.
University and teaching In 1961, aged nineteen, Babachahi entered the Faculty of Letters of Shiraz University (some sources give 1960). There he met poets such as Alireza Tabaei and Mansour Ouji, and they read their poems to one another in a café on Zand Avenue in Shiraz. As a student Babachahi also wrote short stories, but he gave up fiction to devote himself to poetry and to the criticism of poetry after the Shiraz writer Mohammad Moazzen told him that he "was not a good prose writer". The publication of his poems in the weekly Ferdowsi in 1963 and 1964 settled his literary direction.
After his studies and military service, he was appointed a literature teacher in Bushehr in 1966 and taught for about eighteen years in the city's schools. He married in 1969, three years after taking up the post. His wife, Farkhondeh Bakhtiari, taught in Bushehr's secondary schools; the couple had a daughter, Ghazal, and a son, Behrang.
Tekapu and the pre-revolutionary years In autumn 1967 Babachahi became editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Tekapu ("Endeavour") in Bushehr. The magazine was well received in the intellectual circles of Tehran: Khusheh, the magazine edited by Ahmad Shamlou, reprinted texts from it and called its contributors "the craftsmen of today's Iranian poetry". Tekapu was nevertheless banned in 1968, after only three issues, under pressure from the security services and on the pretext that it lacked a licence.
His first collection, Dar bi-tekyegahi ("Without Support"), also appeared in 1967 at his own expense; it gathered poems in Nimaic metres. It was followed by Jahan va roshanayi-ha-ye ghamnak ("The World and the Melancholy Lights", 1970), Az nasl-e aftab ("Of the Lineage of the Sun", 1974) and Seda-ye shen ("The Voice of Sand", 1977); in the same period he also published two books of poetry for children. His poems appeared in the intellectual publications of the time, notably Khusheh and Ferdowsi, and he contributed to magazines such as Roshanfekr and Rudaki.
During these years Babachahi also wrote criticism of poetry. His first critical piece, published in Ferdowsi, was a reply to an article by Reza Baraheni; he then wrote fierce articles against the poetry of Yadollah Royaee. At the time he was a firm opponent of the "volume poetry" (she'r-e hajm) and "new wave" (mowj-e now) movements, and he later said of this period: "At that time I was somewhat ideological, or carried along by the spirit of the age"; his view of these movements, especially of volume poetry, changed in later decades. In September 2022, in an interview with the ISNA on the occasion of Royaee's death, he called him a "valuable" avant-garde poet who "had sufficient command of Iranian and French poetry", said he believed in his literary presence and "had always admired his poems", but described the volume-poetry manifesto as "very bombastic" and as "unscientific and poetic" in its expression. By his account, his political engagement, purely cultural before the revolution, took a "more concrete and more practical" form as the revolution approached.
The Ten Nights of Goethe (October 1977) Ten Nights of Goethe poster "Nights of Iranian Writers and Poets"10–19 October 1977 (18–27 Mehr 1356 SH)
Babachahi's name appears in the programme for Sunday 16 October (the seventh night). Design: Bozorg Khezraei · Goethe-Institut, Tehran Organisation and significance
From 10 to 19 October 1977 (18–27 Mehr 1356) the Writers' Association of Iran, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, held ten evenings of lectures and poetry readings under the title "Nights of Iranian Writers and Poets" in the garden of the Iran–Germany Cultural Society on Pahlavi Avenue (today's Valiasr Street) in Tehran; the series later became known as the "". According to the Encyclopædia Iranica, poetry readings had been held at the institute in earlier years, but in 1977 the Iranian partner was for the first time not the government-sponsored Literary Society of Tehran but the oppositional Writers' Association, which had been allowed to meet again as part of the political liberalisation under Prime Minister Jamshid Amouzegar. The garden of the Cultural Society was chosen because the institute's own premises were considered too small for the expected audience. Members of the association agree that the idea came from the poet Jalal Sarfaraz, who edited the poetry page of the daily Kayhan; the logistics were entrusted to . Sarfaraz later wrote that his model had been the poetry nights of the magazine organised under Ahmad Shamlou, and that the garden was rented, on the suggestion of the institute's director Hans Becker, for 4,000 tomans a night.
According to the Iranica, on the first night the crowd was so large that it spilled into the neighbouring streets, where loudspeakers were set up; up to ten thousand people attended the first nights, and after the rain began the number fell to about three thousand. More than fifty writers, poets, playwrights, critics and translators spoke of censorship, freedom of thought, the responsibilities of intellectuals, inequality and oppression, "thus turning a literary event into a political one". The Azadi website estimates the audience at between ten and fifteen thousand, and an article by "M. Kh." in the online magazine Iranchehr counts 57 speakers and poets.
The association and the institute had agreed that speakers would use the word momayyezi ("inspection"), the term used in the constitution, instead of "censorship"; on the third night, however, revealed the agreement at the very start of his talk and repeatedly used the word "censorship". On the fifth night, after a lecture by , who according to the Azadi website used the word "censorship" more than a hundred times, and a reading by Saeed Soltanpour, the excitement of the crowd peaked and Becker shouted for the poet to leave the stage. It was then decided to drop the lectures, but the new arrangement met with protests from the audience and, after renewed negotiations between the association and the institute, the lectures resumed from the sixth night. At the end of the ninth night a telegram of solidarity from a group of French writers and thinkers, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault, was read out. On the last night the association's chairman, Behazin, told the crowd: "For ten nights you came, in crowds that often reached ten thousand or more [...] and listened to the speakers. What did you hear? Freedom, and freedom, and freedom..."; the association's closing message was read by Houshang Golshiri. The Iranica notes that although armoured personnel carriers surrounded the area, no violence occurred, and that the Ten Nights became "the first in a series of mass protest meetings that culminated in the Revolution of 1979".
The poster was designed by Bozorg Khezraei, a graphic artist at the daily Ettela'at: a small white fish which, in the designer's words, raises "the cry of struggle against censorship and repression". According to Sarfaraz, the censors did not allow the association's name to appear on the poster, which was censored twice; he also wrote that newspapers, radio and television had been ordered not to publish any news or report, and that only published a report in Ayandegan after the first night, which got him into trouble. The Iranchehr account, based on the newspapers of the time, differs somewhat: according to it, four national dailies printed the poster and the programme on 4 October 1977, and Ettela'at, Kayhan and Rastakhiz briefly covered the evenings until the sixth night, after which all but Ettela'at fell silent.
Tapes of the Ten Nights were copied and sold in thousands in Iran and abroad, and the texts of the lectures and poems were published in 1978 by Amir Kabir as Dah shab ("Ten Nights"), edited by . According to Sarfaraz, the master tapes of the lectures and readings, as well as the tapes of the question-and-answer sessions, were later lost through negligence; copies nevertheless survived, and in 2022–2023 the Azadi website published audio files of the readings and lectures together with the poster and a digital copy of the book.
Babachahi's reading on the seventh night
Ali Babachahi reading Ten Nights of Goethe – seventh nightSunday 16 October 1977 (24 Mehr 1356)Garden of the Iran–Germany Cultural Society, Tehran
His poems in the book Dah shab (pp. 447–456): "Hail to the red blossom that sprang from the cup of the East" "Native song" "In praise of the world's lovers" "In the realm of ashes" Duration: 3:35 · Audio source: Azadi (azadi.art)
Babachahi, who was then living in Bushehr, was announced as a participant before the organisers had been able to contact him. On 4 October 1977 Kayhan reported: "Although the names of , Ali Babachahi, Bahman Salehi and Mansour Barmaki appear in the list of participants, the organisers have not been able to reach them because they live in the provinces." According to "M. Kh.", the association, which had no addresses for some of these poets, published their names so that they would hear of it and come; on 10 October Kayhan reported that they had been informed and had declared themselves ready to take part. Of the four, Salehi and Barmaki did not attend.