Nafisi, Azar
Persona
Azar Nafisi, nata nel 1955 a Teheran, è laureata in Letteratura inglese e americana presso la University of Oklahoma. E' stata testimone della rivoluzione iraniana e poi oppositrice del regime instaurato dall'ayatollah Khomeini. Ha lavorato come professore associato presso la Tabatabaii University di Teheran, incarico che ha abbandonato nel 1995, quando ha cominciato a tenere delle lezioni clandestine ad un gruppo di sue allieve: il bestseller "Leggere Lolita a Teheran" (Adelphi, 2004) si rifà all'esperienza di lettura e analisi di alcuni dei classici occidentali censurati dal regime, come "Il grande Gatsby", "Madame Bovary" e, appunto, "Lolita". Nel 1997 si è trsferita negli Stati Uniti, dove insegna alla Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Il suo ultimo libro, "Le cose che non ho detto", è stato pubblicato da Adelphi nel 2009.
Azar Nafisi teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. She studied both in Europe and the United States. During her University years in America, together with other Iranian students, she demonstrated against the Shah's regime. Back in Iran, she obtained a scholarship from Oxford University and taught English Literature at Tehran University, at Free Islamic University and at Allameh Tabatai University of Iran. In 1995 she was expelled from Tehran University for refusing to wear the veil and founded a reading society with seven of her students who gathered weekly in her house to discuss Western literature and their own condition under the Islamic Republic. In 1997 she left Iran for America. Some of her texts have been published on "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "The Wall Street Journal" and "The New Republic". She featured in several TV and radio programmes, from PBS to Fox. She is the author of "Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Nabokov's Novels" (Teheran, 1994). "Reading Lolita in Teheran" appeared for the first time in 2003 and is currently the best selling book in the American charts. She lives in Washington with her husband and her two sons.