Shahrnush Parsipur

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Shahrnush Parsipur (Persian: شهرنوش پارسی پور , born February 17, 1946 in Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian novelist. She is the daughter of an attorney in the Iranian Justice Ministry originally from Shiraz.

[edit] Biography

Born and raised in Tehran, she received her B.A. in sociology from Tehran University in 1973 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 which also featured stories by Esma'il Fasih, Houshang Golshiri, Taqi Modarresi, Bahram Sadeqi, and Gholam Hossein Saedi. Her novella Tajrobeh'ha-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 Tuba va ma'na-ye Shab (Tuba and the Meaning of Night - 1989), which Parsipur wrote after spending four years in prison. Right before her incarceration, she had published a translation called Zanan-e roman-nevis (Woman novel-writers - 1984) of a book by Michelle Mercier. In 1990, she published a short novel, again consisting 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 put pressure on the author to desist from such writing. Early in 1990, Parsipur finished her fourth novel, a 1,000-page story of a female Don Quixote called Aql-e abi'rang (Blue-colored Reason), which remained unavailable as of early 1992.

Shahrnush Parsipur has since left Iran and currently resides in the United States. She is the recipient of the first International Writers Project Fellowship from the Program in Creative Writing and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

[edit] Translation of her works

In India, her novel Women without Men (Zanan Bedun-e Mardan in Persian; translated as Aanungal Illatha Pennungal) was translated into Malayalam by S.A. Qudsi and published by Mathrubhumi Books, Calicut, 2005.