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Azar Nafisi
Category: Literary
Country: Iran
About
Author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi is an Iranian novelist. Nafisi lived in Iran until the age of thirteen, when she went to England for secondary school. After her return to Iran in 1979, and remained there for eighteen years. During Nafisi’s eighteen years in Iran, she taught English Literature at the University of Tehran, Free Islamic Azad University, and Allameh Tabatabaii; Nafisi was criticized for not wearing a veil, which actually prevented her from teaching between 1981 and 1987.
In her return to academia, Nafisi was subsequently chastised for the content of her courses, which prompted her to invite a select number of female students to come to her house so that they could read and discuss literature freely. Eventually, in 1997, Nafisi left Iran and began teaching in the United States where she authored Reading Lolita and Tehran and her two most recent works Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories, and Republic of the Imagination. Azar Nafisi’s book, The Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile will be published in Spring 2011.
Nafisi is currently a Professor and the director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
