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AZAR NAFISI: New 2011 Thought and Literature

For her determined and courageous defense of human values in Iran and her efforts to create awareness through literature about the situation women face in Islamic society.

Forced to leave her country, from U.S. exile she remains one of the most influential voices among silenced Iranian intellectuals.

Her message has contributed strongly in raising awareness about what is happening in Iran and encouraging women from the Islamic world to fight for their rights.

These were the words in the announcement of the jury decision for the Gabarron International Award of Thought and Humanities 2011. The jury recognized AZAR NAFISI's career under the presidency of Mr. Demetrio Madrid Lopez, and with Acting Secretary Mr. Juan Ramón Lucas Fernández. Members of the jury include: Mr. Juan Ramón Lucas Fernández, Journalist and Director of the Spanish National Radio Show "On days like today", The Honorable Mr. Demetrio Madrid López, First President of the board of Castilla y León and President and Advisor of the Second Section of the Consultative Council of Castilla y León, The Honorable Mr. Jesús Núñez Velázquez, President of Universidad Alfonso X el Sabio, Mr. Ignacio Perez Alonso, CEO of The North of Castilla, Mr. Bieito Rubido Ramonde, Director of ABC and Ms. Paloma Segrelles de Arenaza, Member of the Board of Directors for Herbalife Spain and President of the Youths Commission of the Century XXI Club.

Biography


Azar Nafisi was born in Tehran, where her father became the youngest mayor and her mother was one of only six parliamentarians in Iran during the seventies.  

Ms. Nafisi studied in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States before teaching English literature at Tehran University. Following her expulsion from this University for refusing to wear a veil, during the next two years she met with a group of students every Thursday morning at her home to read and discuss works of Western literature that were forbidden by the Iranian regime. This experience inspired her 2003 bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which has been translated into 33 languages and remained on the New York Times’ Bestsellers List for 117 weeks. Ms. Nafisi has won a number of diverse literary awards for this title, including the 2004 Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award from Book Sense, the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, the 2004 Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award and an American Immigration Law Foundation Achievement Award; this book was also a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. An enlarged edition of Reading Lolita in Tehran will be released with a new translation by Duomo Editions in September 2011.

Ms. Nafisi returned to teaching in 1987 at the Free Islamic University and the Allameh Tabatabai, the more liberal academic center in Iran. In 1994 she published a book dedicated to the writer Vladimir Nabakov.

She left Iran in 1997 and settled in America, where she has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic, among others. In 2006, Ms. Nafisi won a Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature, presented by the World Academy of Arts, Literature and Media. Recently, she authored Things I Have Been Silent About (Duomo, 2010), a book that delves into her family’s history and, by extension, Iranian society in recent decades.

Ms. Nafisi currently lives with her husband and two children in Washington, where she teaches about the relationship between culture and politics at John Hopkins University as a Professor of Aesthetics, Culture and Literature and Director of the Dialogue Project at the University’s Foreign Policy Institute.