Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi
Nafisi at the 2015 Texas Book Festival.
Born	Persian: آذر نفیسی‎‎ December 1, 1948 Tehran, Iran
Occupation	Writer, professor
Language	English
Ethnicity	Iranian
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	University of Oklahoma
Notable works	Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Notable awards	2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award (Booksense), Persian Golden Lioness Award

Azar Nafisi (Persian: آذر نفیسی‎‎; born 1948) is an Iranian writer and professor of English literature. She has resided in the United States since 1997 and became an American citizen in 2008.

Nafisi has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and served on the Board of Trustees of Freedom House. 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 Bestseller list for 117 weeks, and has won several literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense.

Since Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi has written Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter and The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books.

Nafisi was born in Tehran, Iran. She is the daughter of Nezhat and Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran (1961–1963), who was the youngest man ever appointed to the post up to that time.

She was raised in Tehran, and at thirteen years old she moved to Lancaster, to finish her studies. After this, she moved to Switzerland. She got a degree in English and American literature and received her Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma.

Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, where for a time she taught English literature at Tehran University, where she stayed during eighteen years struggling against the implementation of the revolution ideas and procedures.