Mimi Khalvati

"As if they were family, flowers surround you / As if they were a story-book, they speak. / They speak through eyes and strange configurations / on their faces, markings on petals, whiskers, // mouth-holes and pointed teeth."

Reviewer Charles Bainbridge applauds Mimi Khalvati's (IWP, 2006) newest collection The Meanest Flower in The Guardian Unlimited: "One of the great strengths of this book is its sense of craft. Khalvati has become increasingly fascinated with stricter metrical forms, and what we have on show here is a remarkable and finely judged sense of patterning, especially in her use of repetition and internal rhyme."

Read the review: The Guardian Unlimited

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1944. She grew up on the Isle of Wight and was educated in Switzerland at the University of Neuchâtel, and in London at the Drama Centre and the School of African and Oriental Studies. She has worked as an actor and director in both the UK and Iran, founding Matrix, a women's experimental theatre group, and co-founding Theatre in Exile.

Her poetry collections include In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995), Entries on Light (2002), and The Chine (2002). A Selected Poems was published in 2000 and a new collection, The Meanest Flower, in 2007. She is also the author of a children's book, I Know a Place, published in 1985.