Azar Nafisi

INSPIRED MINDS


Author Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi was born in Tehran in 1956. She was mainly educated abroad and at thirteen attended school in England before going to study in the USA, where she received a doctorate from the University of Oklahoma.

In 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution, she returned to Iran, hopeful, after being away for seventeen years. There she worked as a lecturer in English literature at the University of Tehran. In her international best-seller titled, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" she describes the Iran's transformation to a religious fundamentalist dictatorship. Gradually, public life becomes regimented down to the smallest things and personal freedom suppressed; draconian punishments for real or alleged wrongdoings lead to enormous pressure to assimilate.

Nafisi was banned from teaching in 1981 when she refused to wear the Islamic veil at lectures. She began to work again only six years later, this time at the University of Allameh Tabatabai. But Nafasi also resigned from this position in 1995, but secretly carried on teaching by setting up a reading group in which she discussed Western literature with seven selected female students in her own home.


Among the works Azar Nafassi chose to teach were books by Fitzgerald, James, Austen - all of which were being judged harshly by Iranian authorities for being decadent and finally, many were not outright banished, they were almost impossible to obtain.

In 1997 Nafisi emigrated with her family to the USA. There she has published essays and written for newspapers such as "The New York Times", "The Washington Post" and "The Wall Street Journal"

Her book "Reading Lolita in Tehran"台灣有翻譯本 has been translated into more than thirty languages and was enthusiastically received by readers and critics alike. In this week's Inspired Minds, Azar Nafassi talks to Breandáin O'Shea about this book and her impressions of Iran today.