# Shahrnush Parsipur

Shahrnush Parsipur (Persian: شهرنوش پارسی‌پور; born 17 February 1946) is an Iranian-born writer and translator.

## Biography

Shahrnush Parsipur was born on 17 February 1946; she was born and raised in Tehran. Parsipur received her B.A. degree in 1973 in sociology from Tehran University, and studied Chinese language and civilization at the Sorbonne from 1976 to 1980.
Her first book was Tupak-e Qermez (The Little Red Ball – 1969), a story for young people. Her first short stories were published in the late 1960s. One early story appeared in Jong-e Isfahan, no. 9 (June 1972), a special short-story issue that also featured stories by Esma'il Fasih, Houshang Golshiri, Taqi Modarresi, Bahram Sadeghi, and Gholam Hossein Saedi. Her novella Tajrobeha-ye Azad (Trial Offers – 1970) was followed by the novel Sag va Zemestan-e Boland (The Dog and the Long Winter), published in 1976. In 1977, she published a volume of short stories called Avizeh'ha-ye Bolur (Crystal Pendant Earrings).
As of the late 1980s, Parsipur received considerable attention in Tehran literary circles, with the publication of several of her stories and several notices and a lengthy interview with her in Donya-ye Sokhan magazine. Her second novel was Touba va ma'na-ye Shab (Touba and the Meaning of Night – 1989), which Parsipur wrote after spending four years and seven months in prison. Right before her incarceration, in 1990, she published a short novel, in the form of connected stories, called Zanan bedun-e Mardan (Women Without Men), which Parsipur had finished in the late 1970s. The first chapter appeared in Alefba, no. 5 (1974). The Iranian government banned Women without Men in the mid-1990s and pressured the author to desist from such writing. Early in 1990, Parsipur finished her fourth novel, a 450-page story of a female Don Quixote called Aql-e abirang (Blue-colored Logos), which remained unavailable as of early 1992.
In 1994 she went to the United States and wrote Prison Memoire, 450 pages of her memoir of four times that she was in different prisons. In 1996 she wrote her fifth novel Shiva, a science fiction of 900 pages. In 1999 she published her sixth novel, Majaraha-ye Sadeh va Kuchak-e Ruh-e Deraxt (The Plain and Small Adventures of the Spirit of the Tree), in 300 pages. In 2002, she published her seventh novel, Bar Bal-e Bad Neshastan (On the Wings of Wind), in 700 pages.
Since 2006, she has made various programs for Radio Zamaneh based in Amsterdam.

## Awards

Parsipur was the recipient of the prestigious Hellmann Hammett Award for Human Rights in 1994 and was honored in 2003 at the Encyclopædia Iranica Gala in Miami, for her lifelong achievements as a novelist and literary figure, the first recipient of the International Writers Project Fellowship from the Program in Creative Writing and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University for 2003 to 2004. She received an honorary doctorate from Brown University in 2010.
In December 2024, Shahrnush Parsipur was included on the BBC's 100 Women list.

## Personal life

She married the Iranian film director Nasser Taghvai, but the marriage ended in divorce after seven years. They have a son together.