A Coffin for Four

Atefe Asadi (b. 1994, Tehran) is a contemporary Iranian poet, author, translator, editor, and lyricist. Her work focuses on women’s rights, minorities, migration, discrimination, and freedom. She was awarded the Hannah Arendt Fellowship in 2022. While living in Iran, Asadi collaborated with various literary magazines and websites, including Sayeh-ha, Konsefr, Ketabchi, and Morva. However, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance banned all three of her short story collections. In exile in Germany, she has been an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime, advocating for international support for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at SOAS University of London. Her most recent book is Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2023). Her next book is Sex and the State: Marriage and the Origins of Gender Inequality (Stanford University Press). Her writing has been featured by Al Jazeera and published by London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Arab, Jacobin, and Middle East Eye. Gould is the editor, author, and publisher of The Textual Materialist: rgould.substack.com.