This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Marjon Mossammaparast’s essay, titled ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran’. She traces the complicated relationship of diasporic Iranians to their vatan, ‘primarily the site of belonging and memory, akin to Country’. Listening to the scattered voices of her vatan – ‘political exiles, religious refugees, the imprisoned and the smuggled, emigrants, lapsed believers, patriots, atheists, the new generation’ – drifting through various communication apps, Mossammaparast captures what it means when people ask her about the ‘situation’ in Iran. 

Marjon Mossammaparast’s latest volume of poetry And to Ecstasy, published by Upswell in 2022, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Award in 2023. Her début collection, That Sight (Cordite, 2018), won the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Mossammaparast was born in Abadan, Iran, in the year of the Islamic Revolution. Here is Marjon Mossammaparast with ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran: Locating ourselves and each other through the voices of the vatan’, published in the June issue of ABR.