Azar Nafisi was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1950. Her father was appointed mayor of Tehran in 1962, holding the office until he was jailed for political reasons in 1963; that same year, her mother became one of the first women members of the Iranian Parliament. A willful woman frustrated by the lack of opportunities available to Iranian women, Azar's mother Nezhat Nafisi became convinced that her marriage to Azar's father had been a mistake. Her relationship to her husband and children was rife with conflict and resentment, and was described by Azar in her 2008 memoir Things I've Been Silent About.

"Ever since I can remember, my brother, father, and I tried to figure out what it was exactly that she wanted from us. We tried to travel with her to that other place that seemed to beckon, to which her eyes were constantly diverted as she gazed beyond the walls of her real home. What frightened me was not her rages but that frozen place in her that we could never penetrate... Mother often said that I resisted her from the moment I was born."

Azar's parents sent her away at age 13 for schooling in Lancaster, England and the United States. In 1979, she graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in English and American literature and returned to Iran. "Everything that had been familiar during my youth had changed beyond recognition," she later recounted. Under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country had been declared a theocratic republic where Islamic scripture was used to justify harsh restrictions on individual freedom. The scope and reach of the new regime's policies became evident when the University of Tehran expelled Nafisi from its faculty in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory Islamic veil.

"Even my gestures - like shaking hands in public - were forbidden," Nafisi has said about the Islamic Republic. "And automatically when I saw a colleague or a friend I would stretch out my hands to shake. And then I realized that if all of these small gestures and details were taken away from me I would become someone who was a stranger to herself. If I had to excise the word "wine" from a book I taught, if I had to think that kissing my husband on the cheek in public was something that should make me feel guilty, then I didn't know who this was who was doing these other things that were alien to her being. Both identity and reality become very fragile under such circumstances."

Reading Lolita

In 1995, Nafisi started a covert all-female study group to discuss the banned work of Western authors Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. The group continued to meet until Nafisi's departure for the United States in 1997. Six years later, the group's experiences caught the attention of readers the world over in Nafisi's memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. Published in 2003, Nafisi's book quickly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for over two years. It has now been translated into more than 30 languages.