Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi (Persian: آذر نفیسی) is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.

Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University.

Nafisi is best known for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 117 weeks. In 2024 it was adapted into a film. Nafisi also authored Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books and That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile. Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times was published on 8 March 2022. She has won several literary awards.

Early life and education

Azar Nafisi was born in Tehran, Iran. She is the daughter of Nezhat and Ahmad Nafisi, the former mayor of Tehran from 1961 to 1963. He was the youngest man ever appointed to the post at that time. In 1963, her mother was a member of the first group of women elected to the National Consultative Assembly. Nafisi is the niece of Iranian scholar, fiction writer, and poet Saeed Nafisi.

Nafisi was raised in Tehran, but when she was 13, she moved to Lancaster, England, to finish her studies. She then moved to Switzerland before returning to Iran briefly in 1963. She completed her degree in English and American literature and received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma.

Career

Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution, and taught English literature at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled from the university for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil.

Years later, during a period of liberalization, she began teaching at Allameh Tabataba'I University. In 1995, Nafisi sought to resign from her position, but the university did not accept her resignation. After repeatedly not going to work, they eventually expelled her, but refused her ability to resign.

From 1995 to 1997, Nafisi invited several female students to attend regular meetings at her house every Thursday morning. They discussed their place as women within post-revolutionary Iranian society. They studied literary works, including some considered "controversial" by the regime, such as Lolita alongside other works such as Madame Bovary. She also taught novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen, attempting to understand and interpret them from a modern Iranian perspective.

After staying in Iran for 18 years after the Revolution, Nafisi returned to the United States in June 1997.

Literary and academic work

In addition to her books, Nafisi has written for The New York Times The Washington Post, The Guardian, 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 in several languages. 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 (translated into Italian, as BiBi e la voce verde, and Hebrew).

Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow.

In 2003, Nafisi published Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. The book describes her experiences as a secular woman living and working in the Islamic Republic of Iran right after the Revolution. In 2008, Nafisi authored a memoir about her mother titled Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter.

On October 21, 2014, Nafisi authored The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, in which using The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, as well as the writings of James Baldwin and many others, Nafisi responds to an Iranian reader that questioned whether Americans care about or need their literature.

In 2019, the English translation of That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile was published by Yale University Press. Nafisi's subsequent book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times was published on March 8, 2022.

Nafisi has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture. She often writes about totalitarian tendencies in both Iran and the U.S. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights by policymakers and various national and international human rights organizations.

Critical response

Nafisi's books have received critical acclaim from authors, publishing houses, and newspapers.

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Michiko Kakutani described Reading Lolita in Tehran in The New York Times Book Review as "resonant and deeply affecting… an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction-- on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual". Stephen Lyons for USA Today called the book "an inspiring account of an insatiable desire for intellectual freedom in Iran," and Publishers Weekly said of Reading Lolita, "This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three." Kirkus Reviews called Reading Lolita, "A spirited tribute both to the classics of world literature and to resistance against oppression."