Golrokh Ghobadi was born in 1956 in the city of Sanandaj, the capital city of the Kurdistan region of Iran. She finished school there. In 1974 she began her clandestine political activitiy in Iran’s Kurdistan with a Marxist circle which became known as Kumeleh during the Revolution of 1979. In order to advance her political agenda in Kurdistan, she took teaching jobs in the villages of that province. She participated in the 1979 revolution and was one of the founders of the Sanandaj Women Council. In 1980, she became the first female member of the Revolutionary Organization of Iranian Kurdistan Toilers (Kumeleh). After the Islamic Republic’s armed forces attacked and invaded some of the major cities of Iranian Kurdistan in the summer of 1979, she became one of the first women to join the armed wing of the Kumeleh. In 1983, when the Communist Party of Iran was founded, she enjoined her ranks and after the first split in the party, she left both the Party and the Kumeleh. She left Iran in 1989 and took refuge in Sweden. From then on, she continued her activities in the women’s movement. She has written several articles on women’s struggles including A Look at Women’s Struggles in Iran’s Kurdistan (2010) and The Development of Feminism in Iran’s Kurdistan (2012). She is one of the founders of The Conference of the Women of Iranian Kurdistan (Abroad) which has organized four such events between 2011 to 2014 in four different countries with the help of other women’s rights activists.
She wrote her first book Poppies in Rocky Land in 2015, depicting the life and times of the Kurdish woman of Iranian Kurdistan. In 2020 she wrote the Poppy Fields narrating the untold stories of woman militants of Iran’s Kurdistan, published by Noghteh Publishing. She is now working on her third book, also on the struggle of the Kurdish women of Iran, to be published by Noghteh Publishers.