Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi
Nafisi at the 2015 Texas Book Festival.
Nafisi at the 2015 Texas Book Festival.
BornPersian: آذر نفیسی
(1948-12-01) 1 December 1948 (age 75)
Tehran, Pahlavi Iran
OccupationWriter, professor
LanguageEnglish
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Oklahoma
Notable worksReading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Notable awards2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award (Booksense), Persian Golden Lioness Award

Azar Nafisi (Persian: آذر نفیسی; born 1948)[Notes 1][1] is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.[2]

Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University.[3]

She is the niece of a famous Iranian scholar, fiction writer and poet Saeed Nafisi. Azar Nafisi is best known for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 117 weeks, and has won several literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense.[4][5]

In addition to Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi has authored, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter,[6] The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books[7] and That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile.[8] Her newest book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times was published March 8, 2022.[9]


Cite error: There are <ref group=Notes> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=Notes}} template (see the help page).

  1. ^ "Moving stories: Azar Nafisi". BBC News. Middle East. 2 January 2004. Retrieved December 8, 2018.
  2. ^ Iranian-American author lectures at the Spanish National Library Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ "About Azar". Azar Nafisi. Retrieved 2022-03-03.
  4. ^ "StevenBarclayAgency". Barclayagency.com. Archived from the original on 2015-03-29. Retrieved 2017-01-18.
  5. ^ "Yale University Office of Public Affairs". Opa.yale.edu. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
  6. ^ "Chatting Up A Storm with Claudia Cragg : Azar Nafisi --Talking of 'Lolita', 'Things I've Been Silent About' and the "Sarah Palins/Hilary Clintons of Iran..."". Ccragg123.libsyn.com. Retrieved 2017-01-18.
  7. ^ "The Republic of Imagination Classics – Penguin Classics – Because what you read matters. – Penguin Group (USA)". www.penguin.com. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
  8. ^ "That Other World | Yale University Press". yalebooks.yale.edu. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
  9. ^ "Read Dangerously". HarperCollins. Retrieved 2022-03-03.