Rumi

Rumi was born in 1207 in Vakhsh (now Tajikistan) to a family of learned Persian Muslim theologians. He founded the Malawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. Rumi’s masterpiece, the Mathnawi, has been called the Koran in Persian. He died in 1273 in Konya in present-day Turkey.

Farrukh Dhondy is a London-based writer, screenwriter, playwright, and activist of Indian Parsi descent. He has published novels and short stories, written screenplays for Bollywood, and been a commissioning editor at TV 4 in the UK. In 2012, he celebrated the opening of his opera based on Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.