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Azar Nafisi

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Azar Nafisi 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.

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.

She is the niece of 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.

In addition to Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi has authored, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books and That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile, and Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.

Bio sourced from Wikipedia.

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  • Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

    Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

    Azar Nafisi 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. She has held several academic leadership roles at universities such as Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Oxford. After her emigration, she became a prominent writer, known best for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which topped The New York Times Best Sellers list and remained on it for over two years. In Reading Lolita, Nafisi recounts her experience teaching censored Western literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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