Shahrnush Parsipur, author of ‘Women Without Men’: Iran loses one of its bravest literary voices

The death of the Iranian novelist and feminist writer, Shahrnush Parsipur, at the age of 80 marks the loss of one of the most courageous and original voices in modern Persian literature. For more than five decades, Parsipur wrote women into spaces from which they had often been excluded: history, politics, spirituality and even storytelling.

Imprisoned under both the shah and the Islamic Republic, censored, banned and eventually exiled, she remained committed to a simple but radical idea: women deserve to be the authors of their own lives.

Born in Tehran in 1946, Parsipur entered Iranian literature at a time when female writers occupied only a small corner of the literary landscape. After studying sociology at the University of Tehran in the late 1960s, she emerged as part of a generation of female writers who transformed the modern Persian literary landscape.

Exposing systems of power

After the pioneering work of academic and writer Simin Daneshvar, Parsipur came to be recognised as a distinctive voice in a wave of female authors who expanded the possibilities of modern Persian fiction. After publishing short stories and novellas throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Parsipur published The Dog and the Long Winter in 1976, further establishing a literary career that would eventually make her one of the...

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