Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature, born in Tehran. ¹ She is best known for Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 117 weeks and has been translated into dozens of languages. ^{1 2}

Nafisi was born in Tehran, the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, the city's mayor from 1961 to 1963, and of Nezhat Nafisi, one of the first women elected to Iran's parliament. ¹ At thirteen she was sent to Lancaster, England, for her schooling, continued her studies in Switzerland, and took her doctorate in English and American literature at the University of Oklahoma. ¹ Her birth year is given differently across sources: Wikidata records 1948, while the Arabic and Urdu articles give 1955 and the English article states no birth date; the museum keeps 1948 at year precision as a debated date. ^{3 2}

She returned to Iran in 1979 and taught English literature at the University of Tehran, from which she was expelled in 1981 for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. ¹ She later taught at Allameh Tabataba'i University, which expelled her in 1995 after refusing her resignation. ¹ From 1995 to 1997 she held a Thursday-morning book group for former students at her home, reading Lolita, Madame Bovary and other novels — the experience at the heart of her best-known book. ¹ In June 1997 she emigrated to the United States, and she became a US citizen in 2008. ¹

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) describes her experiences as a secular woman living and working in the Islamic Republic of Iran after the Revolution. ¹ She followed it with Things I've Been Silent About (2008), a memoir of her mother; The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (2014); That Other World, on Nabokov and exile; and Read Dangerously (2022). ¹ She directed the Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and has been a Centennial Fellow at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. ¹ She lives in Washington DC with her husband and two children. ²

• The source entities cited above, registered under data/source/.