Saghar Setareh
Saghar Setareh is an Iranian writer, photographer and cookbook author who has been living in Rome since 2007. In 2023 she published her début cookbook, Pomegranates & Artichokes (Murdoch Books/Interlinks Publishing). The book charts her personal culinary journey from Iran to Italy. It describes the many parallels that link Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food cultures and shows how ingredients and recipes – unconstrained by borders – are shared and transformed through the immigrant experience.
“I simply needed more time to be surrounded by art and creativity and test different waters. Eventually, my voice would have come to me, or rather, I would have to find the creative voice that had always been inside me.”
“Piece by piece, I tried to let go of the ideas I didn’t care about and I tried to reach within. During one of these meditations, I heard my own voice telling me, ‘But it’s all already here inside you. You have already done this.’”
“I know it was somewhere in me, yet I couldn’t evoke it. Like some old witchcraft, it seemed like I needed to know its name to call it to me. It was mine, but I had to recognise it first to summon it, like a demon except that it wasn’t a demon – it was my calling, my drive, my book.”
