Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. She was born and raised in Iran and came to the United States to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Afterwards, Nafisi returned to Iran and taught English at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987. She taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai, and then held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the Revolution in 1979. Dr. Nafisi returned to the United States in 1997 — earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth, and especially young women.
Books in order of publication:
Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)
Things I’ve Been Silent About (2008)
The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (2014)
That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile (2019)
Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (March 2022)
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