Prison Memoir

Shahrnush Parsipur was one of Iran’s most vital, celebrated literary voices, who wrote fearlessly of female desire and liberation. Her unflinching, often surprising memoir is published here in its entirety in English for the first time.

In Prison Memoir we see Parsipur at twenty-five, when she divorces her husband and tries to make an independent life for herself and her young son in Paris. But the turmoil of post-revolutionary Tehran soon draws her back, even though she is imprisoned four times, first for resigning from her TV job in protest at the execution of two poets, and later for publishing her celebrated novel Women Without Men, eventually to be driven into exile.

Moving and impassioned, yet told with flashes of humour, Prison Memoir captures the surreal experience of serving time as a political prisoner without charge, witnessing the systematic elimination of opposition to fundamentalist power, and trying to make sense of it all in the aftermath.