Reza Gharib (رضا غریب) Archives - Ethnographic Media Group

Author

Reza Gharib (رضا غریب)

Reza Gharib was born in Shiraz in 1970 and spent over two decades working as a civil engineer and municipal planner, quietly circulating verses within independent literary circles. Following the sustained suppression of student and intellectual movements in Tehran, his outspoken writing and refusal to submit to state censorship placed him under the direct scrutiny of authorities. Facing imminent arrest, he fled Iran in 2011, leaving behind his professional standing, ancestral home, and extended family to seek asylum in the southern hemisphere.
Now fifty-six, he lives in the historic regional city of Ipswich, Queensland, where he works night shifts within the industrial transport corridors of the Bremer River basin. Navigating the quiet dissonance between his previous life and his present displacement, he spends his daylight hours tending potted fig and pomegranate saplings beneath the subtropical sun, observing a landscape that bears no resemblance to the foothills of the Zagros mountains.
In the solitude of his timber cottage, he channels the weight of dislocation into evocative poetry that bridges classical Persian forms with modernist free verse. His work examines the bitter geography of separation—the silence of digital blackouts back home, the bureaucratic paper walls of modern immigration, and the slow erasure of identity that often accompanies physical safety. Published through Ethnographic Media Group, his writing stands as an intimate record of survival, exile, and the fragile endurance of cultural memory.
Note: Reza Gharib is a pseudonym adopted in accordance with Persian literary tradition and for the ongoing safety of extended family residing abroad.

Poetry

The Luxury of Watching

by Reza Gharib (رضا غریب) 6 September 2026

Across the southern sea, the eucalyptus stands in quiet light,unmoved by the burning thorns of my distant province.The evening falls... Read more.