Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-born writer who now resides in the United States. Nasifi was born in Tehran, the capital city of Iran; her father was the mayor of Tehran from 1961-1963. Her mother was one of the first female members of the Iranian Parliament in the 1960s, setting an example of high expectations for women as well as men in the family. Nafisi studied in England and Switzerland in her early teen years before returning to Iran for the remainder of her high school years when her father was arrested. After finishing college, Nafisi taught English Literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai University in Iran until she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear a veil in 1981. Nafisi left Iran for America in 1997; she worked as a visiting professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. Nafisi's major works include Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, and the best-selling novel Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books which spent 117 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi is a national best-seller and a global phenomenon. Chronicling Nafisi's time as a female professor of Western Literature at the University of Tehran in the 1970s, her expulsion from the...
