I was born and grew up in Iran, a country that I love to my bones. No other explanation is needed to describe my attachment to my homeland. I spent a decade as a research scientist in biotechnology laboratories and on boats in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea as a marine biologist. At some point, life required me to leave. I eventually did. I later wrote about it in one of my songs:
The House I Left Behind
A small suitcase of laughter,
Too heavy just to close,
Memories too tender for zippers
Creased like an old shirt
That still smells of home.
No house is free from sorrow,
But the one I left behind
Still bleeds into my shadows,
Still whispers in my mind.
I left a sunset window
With my mother in the flame.
A courtyard where your childhood voice
Still echoes like goodbye.
Payman Moayedi, London, 2020
I came to the UK when I was thirty-two, on a very cold Tuesday night on the 9th of January 2001, and started my job as a journalist at the BBC from nine o’clock the following morning. The work that still goes on. Living and working in London has opened new horizons in my life that I never imagined before, a path that was not always easy, but always onward. For this, I am grateful to my adopted country, the country that gave me the opportunity to flourish, and gave me the space to think, to grow, and to become more fully myself.
I hold a PhD in bioscience from the University of Westminster, awarded in 2014, for research examining the science and policy of biofuels in the UK and European Union. Before that I completed a master’s degree in marine biology and a bachelor’s degree in zoology. I began my scientific career in the 1990s as a marine scientist at the Iranian Department of Environment, working in the ecological systems of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea region. I also worked as a research scientist at the Iranian Research Organisation for Science and Technology, where my work on the biological treatment of industrial effluents resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in Fresenius Environmental Bulletin in 1998.
Since joining the BBC in 2001, I have spent more than two decades leading multidisciplinary teams and reporting on energy, climate, ecology, and environmental policy. I have sat in front of cameras and microphones at some of the most consequential moments in recent climate and energy history, and have watched, with growing urgency, the gap between what scientists know and what the public understands.
I am a published poet. My first collection, in Persian, was published in the spring of 2001. Poetry and science are not, in my experience, opposites. They are both attempts to say something true about the world with the greatest possible precision and the least possible waste of words.
I also produce music, writing my own lyrics in Persian and English. Some of my work is available on YouTube. Music, like poetry and science, is another way of saying something true about the world that prose cannot quite reach.
I live in north London with my wife Roxana and my daughter Afra.
Payman Moayedi 