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Azar Nafisi, author: Iranians are fighting for their freedom

Azar Nafisi, author: Iranians are fighting for their freedom

The Interview vor 7 Monaten

Svetlana Reiter speaks to Tehran-born writer, Azar Nafisi, about the situation in Iran

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'What the regime does to women is even if they don't kill us,
when you stop a woman from being herself, stop her from speaking
the way she wants to or stop her from connecting, it’s a kind of
murder. And so we're fighting for our existence. We're fighting
our survival.’

Svetlana Reiter speaks to the Iranian-American writer, Azar
Nafisi, about the current instability in the country of her birth
as Iranians continue to seek regime change in Tehran.

Born in Tehran in 1956, the story of her life has been greatly
shaped by the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, when Nafisi
taught English literature at the University of Tehran. She was
expelled from the University for not wearing a hijab, and
eventually left for the US less than two decades later.

Nafisi is best-known for her New York Times bestseller, Reading
Lolita in Tehran, in which she wrote about her experiences under
the Islamic regime. The book focuses on a short period before she
left Iran in 1997, when she would gather a group of young women
at her house one morning every week to read and discuss forbidden
works of Western literature.

Thank you to the BBC Russian Service for their help in making
this programme. The Interview brings you conversations with
people shaping our world, from all over the world. The best
interviews from the BBC, including episodes with Russian punk
activist Maria Alyokhina, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and
author Sir Salman Rushdie. You can listen on the BBC World
Service on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 0800 GMT. Or you
can listen to The Interview as a podcast, out three times a week
on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presenter: Svetlana Reiter Producers: Anastasia Soroka and Ben
Cooper Editor: Damon Rose

Get in touch with us on email TheInterview@bbc.co.uk and use the
hashtag #TheInterviewBBC on social media.

(Image: Azar Nafisi Credit: Massimo Valicchia/NurPhoto via Getty
Images)