Azar Nafisi
Writer and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.
(Teheran, Iran, 1955). A writer and outstanding defender of human rights in Iran, in particular those of women and young people, she has been living in exile in the United States since 1997 and is presently teaching Aesthetics, Culture and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University of Washington. She studied in Great Britain and the United States and has taught in Oxford University and the University of Teheran, from which she was dismissed in 1981 for refusing to wear the veil. With seven of her students, she then set up a clandestine reading group in her home, an experience she describes in her internationally-acclaimed book Reading Lolita in Teheran (Random House, 2003), which was published in Spanish as Leer Lolita en Teherán (El Aleph, 2003). Her most recent work, Things I’ve Been Silent About (Random House, 2008), which will be published in Spanish as Cosas que he callado (Duomo, 2010), tells the story of her family – which was very close to the regime of the Shah, her father being Mayor of Teheran and her mother one of the six women members of the Iranian Parliament – and also chronicles her memories of the Islamic Revolution.
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