Acclaimed Iranian Feminist Writer Shahrnush Parsipur Dies at 80

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, who cloaked uncompromising feminist ideals in stories and novels that glowed with magical realism, died on July 3 in San Francisco following a stroke. She was eighty. Parsipur was imprisoned multiple times over the course of a career spanning six decades, her views on women’s rights and her frank discussion of female sexual desire deemed intolerable first by Iran’s shah and then by the country’s post–Islamic Revolution government. She had lived in exile in the US since 1994. Parsipur is best known in the West for her novel Women Without Men, written in 1979 and published over a decade later. The work was adapted into a film in 2009 by artist Shirin Neshat, winning the Silver Lion at the Sixty-Sixth Venice Film Festival. Shahrnush Parsipur was born on February 17, 1946, in Tehran, the daughter of an attorney father and a homemaker mother. She began writing stories and articles as a teenager and was publishing them regularly in her home country’s literary journals by the time she was in college. Graduating from the University of Tehran in 1973 with a degree in sociology, Parsipur took a job as a producer with the national broadcaster but quit the following year in protest of the state’s execution of two journalist-poets by SAVAK, the Iranian secret police. She was subsequently imprisoned for several months on charges of opposing the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Parsipur published her first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, in 1974. One of the first novels by a woman to appear in twentieth-century Iran, it limned a young woman’s blossoming desire to push back against a patriarchal society. Shortly after the book’s release, she decamped for Paris, where she studied Chinese language and history at the Sorbonne. During her tenure in the French capital, she wrote 1977’s Plain and Small Adventures of the Spirit of the Tree and Women Without Men. Forced by the circumstances of the Islamic Revolution to do so, she abandoned her education and returned to her native country. In 1981, she was imprisoned for having illegal papers in her car. Though she was eventually able to prove that they were not illegal, and though she was never formally charged with a crime, she spent four and a half years in jail, where she was subjected to solitary confinement and religious reeducation. While incarcerated, she began work on Touba and the Meaning of Night, which followed a woman living in modern Iran. The manuscript was discovered by guards, who demanded she change portions of it; she destroyed it instead. Parsipur finished the book on her 1986 release from prison and published it in 1989. The next year, Women Without Men was released, interweaving the stories of five women attempting to free themselves from the patriarchal oppression of 1953 Tehran. References to virginity in the book saw Parsipur jailed two more times. Her incarceration affected the republication of The Dog and the Long Winter, whose reprinting had been forbidden immediately following the Islamic Revolution; the government banned the book, seized the freshly minted reprints, and destroyed them. In 1993, while on a lecture tour of Europe and the US, Parsipur realized she could not continue to live in a country where all her books were banned. She moved to the US the following year and continued to write. Her memoir of her time in prison arrived in Persian in 1996; it was translated to English in 2013. Other books include the 1999 science fiction novel Shiva, the 2002 On the Wings of the Wind, and the 2009 novel Asieh Between Two World. Parsipur taught at Brown University in the early 2000s and lectured internationally throughout the ensuing decades. She eventually moved to Richmond, California, where she lived at her death. Parsipur married filmmaker Nasser Taghvai in 1967; the pair divorced in 1974. She is survived by their son, Ali Taghvai; a brother, Shahbaz Parsipur, and a sister, Miryam Parsipur. Interviewed by The Guardian earlier this year, Parsipur was hopeful about the future of Iranian women. “The women of Iran have changed so much, so many without hijab,” she told the publication. “They don’t care what the Islamic Republic thinks. The women of Iran,” she concluded, “will cause the fall of the Islamic Republic.”