Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been urged to pardon two poets who have been sentenced to 99 lashes each and a total of 20 years in jai for supposedly insulting religion.

More than 100 poets, including Robert Pinsky, Claudia Rankine, Billy Collins, John Ashbery, and Tracy K Smith, have signed a letter urging Khamenei to annul sentences given to Mehdi Mousavi and Fatemeh Ekhtesari.

Mousavi, 41, and Ekhtesari, 31, have been sentenced respectively to nine and eleven-and-a-half years in prison after an exiled singer deemed disrespectful of religion used their work in two of his albums.



The pair were initially arrested in December 2013 in connection with Shahin Najafi, a controversial Germany-based Iranian rapper, but were released on bail. They have also been condemned to 99 lashes each for shaking hands with unrelated members of the opposite sex, presumably each other.

A Tehran court has found them guilty of insulting religion and spreading propaganda against the state, it emerged last month. An Iranian filmmaker, Keyvan Karimi, who was tried alongside the poets, has also been sentenced to six years in jail and 223 lashes, but details of his case have not been made public.

The open letter, published on the website of the PEN America Centre, said: “We are deeply concerned by the inhumane sentences levied against Ms Ekhtesari and Mr Mousavi for the simple act of expressing themselves by creating art.”

It continued: “The act of writing poetry is no crime. Freedom of expression, a fundamental right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, allows creativity to flourish and promotes the creation of great literature.”



The signatories described the treatment of the two Iranians as cruel and unwarranted in a country famous for its literary history and for poets such as Hafez, Saadi, Rumi and Ferdowsi.

They said: “The work of these poets deserves to be celebrated as a contribution to that rich tradition, not punished. Their harsh sentences form part of a disturbing pattern of escalating pressure on artists and cultural figures, as well as journalists including the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian.” The Iranian-American reporter was convicted of espionage in October after being held for more than a year, but the details of his sentence have not yet been revealed to him, nor to the public.

The poets’ lawyer, Amir Raisian, told the Guardian on the phone from Tehran on Tuesday that he has appealed against the sentence but it was not clear when an appeals court would hear the case. “We are hopeful for the court of appeal to commute the sentences,” he said. “Shahin Najafi has used a couple of poems from Mousavi and one poem from Ekhtesari in two of his albums but my clients have not collaborated with the singer on the albums that the authorities in Iran consider disrespectful to the sanctities.”

Sepideh Jodeyri, a prominent Iranian poet and translator, who has faced many difficulties in Iran because of her work, said the sentencing of the two in her country did not take her by surprise.



“This is not new,” she told the Guardian. They’ve been trying to sew our lips for some years now. They’ve been condemned because they are poets and because poetry upholds equality and human rights.”

Suzanne Nossel, director of PEN America, said the sentencing of Mousavi and Ekhtesari sent the worst signal at a time when Iran was trying to demonstrate a more integrated and visible role in world affairs.



“It is not often that poets join together in a blunt political statement, but this sentence is an affront not just to governments or advocates, but to all who understand that without creativity a culture and society cannot thrive,” she said.

