Biographical note

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, on 28 April 1944. She grew up on the Isle of Wight and was educated in Switzerland at the University of Neuchatel, 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. She is co-ordinator of the Poetry School, running poetry workshops and courses in London, and is co-editor of Tying the Song: A First Anthology from the Poetry School 1997-2000 (2000); Entering the Tapestry: A Second Anthology from the Poetry School (2003); and I Am Twenty People: A Third Anthology from the Poetry School (2007). She is a tutor at the Arvon Foundation, and has taught Creative Writing at universities and colleges in the US and England. She was Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail as part of the Poetry Society's Poetry Places scheme and has given readings of her work at the Voice Box at the South Bank Centre in London, the Poetry Society and at festivals in Britain and mainland Europe.Her poetry collections include In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995), for which she was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Award, Entries on Light, and The Chine (2002). A Selected Poems was published in 2000 and a new collection, The Meanest Flower, in 2007, shortlisted for the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize. She is also the author of a children's book, I Know a Place, published in 1985.