| Shahrnush Parsipur was born in 1946. She published her first short stories in literary magazines at the age of 16, and went on to write essays, story collections, and several novels. She was arrested for the first time in 1974, by the Shah's intelligence agency, and would be jailed three additional times under the Islamic Republic. While incarcerated she wrote the first part of her masterpiece Tuba and the Meaning of Night. Parsipur now lives and writes in exile in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1994 she was recognized by the Fund for Free Expression of Human Rights Watch--Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammet Fund. “ Parsipur .. endured jail and torture to preserve her sense of dignity and integrity, and as a writer and innovator … Her protagonists are women whose rebellions are not merely political but existential, against a system that denies them individual dignity and stunts their potential for growth.\" - Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran “ When I left Iran, I took three books … one of them was Touba and the Meaning of Night … Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman and above all a great writer” - Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis “Shahrnush Parsipur makes a case against every kind of fundamentalism. But above all she narrates a great history book and a great story. Not only does she borrow the oriental coin of Sherherazade, but she also avails herself artfully of the narrative technique of Western masters from Umberto Eco to García Márquez.” - Die Zeit “Parsipur illuminates the last hundred years of Iranian history in the form of a captivating story about the quest of a woman named Touba … Her Odyssey [is] a search for truth and identity in a world in which the old certainties and values have lost their meaning.” - Neue Zürcher Zeitung |
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