Azar Nafisi January 17, 2009

Bestselling Iranian author Azar Nafisi of Reading Lolita in Tehran fame will give a talk on her latest project Things I Have Been Silent About, a deeply personal memoir about her early years in Iran. Reaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things Ive Been Silent About is a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which turned Azar Nafisis beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of her mothers historic term in Parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi explores the remarkable coffee hours her mother presided over, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgment of things never spoken about, and which then evolved into gatherings where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution.

Azar Nafisi is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In the 1970s she won a fellowship from Oxford and went on to teach English literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai University in Iran. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil and left Iran for America in 1997. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, has appeared on countless radio and television programs, and is the author of Things I've Been Silent About, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokovs Novels.

Event submitted by Eventful.com on behalf of writersfestival.