Michael Mehrdad Zand Ahanchian is a writer, poet, editor and researcher. He was born in Iran but has spent most of his life in London. He now lives near Reading and is a research student at Roehampton University, where he is working with Peter Jaeger, Jeff Hilson and Mark Knight.

His poetry has a penchant for the frayed edges of language, the places where tongues get tied with each other and where sometimes something new emerges. He has read at a number of poetry events, including Openned, La Langoustine est Morte, Crossing the Line and Diverse Deeds , and has participated in various collaborations with musicians and sound artists.

Other projects include his blogsite proetics and an ongoing international translation project called lexico, for which he won the Roehampton Poetry Performance Prize in 2008. He is currently working on a new creative and contemporary translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , called ruby.

His website is here.