Mammad Aidani undertook formal tertiary study in Italian and Political Theory after migrating to Australia. He was awarded a Diploma in Applied Linguistics (Melbourne) focusing on literacy, language and society, communication and bi-lingualism, a Bachelor of Arts degree (Queensland) and a MA (Melbourne) investigating the way in which language influences the self-image and confidence of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. He worked for 10 years in the Western Region of Melbourne with Early Childhood programs, assisting children from non-English-speaking backgrounds with their emotional, intellectual and linguistic development. He also worked with the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture on the community writing project The Voices from the Deep Close Distance 1997.
Aidan's early poetry draws on individual responses to feelings and sensations which suggest the struggle of the late nineteenth-century poet with Romanticism and Modernism and a migrant poet's struggle with the language of daily life, English common usage and the experience of exile from a well remembererd homeland. As a playwright he has explored contemporary alienation, disadvantage and the construction of meaning. His fiction has also drawn on the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. His first novel, A Picture out of Frame was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year Award in 1997.
