Professor &
Bestselling Author, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi is best-known
as the author of the national bestseller Reading
Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its
readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of
the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university
professor and her students. Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic
readership, Reading
Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative
powers of fiction in a world of tyranny. The book has spent
over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list to date.
Reading
Lolita in Tehran has been translated in 32 languages, and
has won diverse literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction
Book of the Year Award from Booksense, the Frederic W. Ness
Book Award, the 2004 Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award, an achievement
award from the American Immigration Law Foundation, as well
as being a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for
Memoir. In 2006 she won a Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature,
presented by the World Academy of Arts, Literature, and Media.
Azar Nafisi is a Visiting
Professor and the director of the Cultural Conversations at
the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School
of Advanced International Studies in Washington , DC , where
she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and
teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics.
Azar Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching
and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important
role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution
in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic
University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United
States in 1997 — earning national respect and international
recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals,
youth, and especially young women. In 1981, she was expelled
from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory
Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987.
Azar Nafisi conducted
workshops in Iran for women students on the relationship between
culture and human rights; the material culled from these workshops
formed the basis of a new human rights education curriculum.
She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian
on the political implications of literature and culture, as
well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and
the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism
and an open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues
related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and
various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere.
She is also involved in the promotion of not just literacy,
but of reading books with universal literary value.
Azar Nafisi has written
for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The
Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, "The Veiled Threat:
The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem" published in The
New Republic (February 22, 1999) has been reprinted into
several languages. She is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical
Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels. She also wrote
the new introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition
of Tolstoy’s Hadji
Murad, as well as the introduction to Iraj Pezeshkzad’s
My
Uncle Napoleon, published by Modern Library (April 2006).
She has published a children’s book (with illustrator
Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice (in
Italy with Adelphi, as BiBi e la voce verde). BiBi
and the Green Voice. Azar Nafisi’s new book, Things
I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother,
was published in January 2009. She is currently working on a
book entitled Republic of the Imagination, which is about
the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples. She lives
in Washington, D.C.
•••
“Transcends categorization
as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is
superb as all three…. Nafisi has produced an original
work on the relationship
between life and literature.”
— Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“I was enthralled and
moved by Azar Nafisi’s account of how she defied, and
helped others to defy, radical Islam’s war against women.
Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections
about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about
the ordeals of freedom—as well as a stirring account of
the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from
an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher.”
— Susan Sontag
“When I first saw Azar
Nafisi teach, she was standing in a university classroom in
Tehran, holding a bunch of red fake poppies in one hand and
a bouquet of daffodils in the other, and asking, "What
is kitsch?" Now, mesmerizingly, she reveals the shimmering
worlds she created in those classrooms, inside a revolution
that was an apogee of kitsch and cruelty. Here, people think
for themselves because James and Fitzgerald and Nabokov sing
out against authoritarianism and repression. You will be taken
inside a culture, and on a journey, that you will never forget.”
— Jacki Lyden, National
Public Radio, author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba
“Stunning...a literary
life raft on Iran’s fundamentalist sea... All readers
should read it.”
– Margaret Atwood
“Remarkable...an eloquent
brief on the transformative power of fiction.”
