Azar Nafisi
- Prizes judged
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature.
Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008. Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University.
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 Best Seller list for 117 weeks, and has won several literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense.
Her other books include Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile and Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.
Background
Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.
Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.
The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.