Remembering Shahrnush Parsipur, the Iranian feminist literary icon

4 min readJul 8, 2026 09:06 PM IST

Iranian writer-activist Shahrnush Parsipur (1946-2026).

Shahrnush Parsipur, whom Iranian authorities imprisoned four times under two governments (twice for the writing that made her famous) is no more. The 80-year-old writer-activist passed away in the United States, where she lived in political exile for more than three decades.

Parsipur published her first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, in 1974, becoming  (in her own words) the second woman in Iranian history to publish a novel, after Simin Daneshvar. Two later novels, Touba and the Meaning of Night (1989) and Women Without Men (1989), secured her standing in the firmament of Persian letters.

She wrote part of Touba and the Meaning of Night, about a woman’s search for autonomy in a patriarchal world, in prison. She told the Los Angeles Times she had finished half the manuscript there before guards confiscated it. They did return it, only a year later, but not before destroying two pages about the death of a girl.

The UK edition of Faridoun Farrokh’s translation Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year. Farrokh had first published the translation in the US in 2011, but Penguin brought it to Britain only in 2026. The novel, however, remains banned in Iran. Set in Tehran around the 1953 coup, it follows five women, among them a wealthy housewife, a sex worker, a schoolteacher, who abandon the constraints of family and society and converge on a garden outside the city. One turns herself into a tree to preserve her virginity, while another is killed by her brother for defying him.

The book circulated for years underground in Iran, passed from reader to reader, until a copy reached the wife of an Islamic Republic official, and Parsipur was arrested again, as per a report in The Guardian. In all, she was detained four times, once under the Shah and three times under the Islamic Republic. The first arrest followed her resignation from Iranian National Radio and Television, where she had worked as a producer, in protest of the execution of two dissident poets by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. She was held 54 days without charge. A second arrest, in the early 1980s, came after security agents searching her car found old newspapers and pamphlets from banned political groups. This arrest led to her longest imprisonment, four years and seven months, without formal charges.

She later wrote about that period in a memoir, Kissing the Sword, which the Feminist Press is set to reissue in English in 2027. Her two remaining arrests came over Women Without Men itself. She was jailed once after its initial publication, and again after a copy reached the wrong household.

Parsipur left Iran in 1994 and settled in Northern California, where she remained for the rest of her life. Exile did not silence her, and  she published eight more works of fiction, along with the memoir, and kept speaking publicly about Iran until the end. In one of her last interviews, given to The Guardian earlier this year, she described a country transformed. “The women of Iran have changed so much, so many without hijab. They don’t care what the Islamic Republic thinks.” she told the British newspaper, adding, “They will cause the fall of the Islamic Republic.”

In 2009, the Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat adapted Women Without Men into a feature film that won international awards. Parsipur will be remembered for posterity for articulating the feminine experience in a overwhelmingly patriarchal and censorous society. Her writings also show how myth and magical realism can be used to tell the truth in a world where resistance is punished.

Aishwarya Khosla is a senior editorial figure at The Indian Express, where she spearheads the digital strategy and execution for the Books & Literature and Puzzles & Games sections. With over eight years of experience in high-stakes journalism, Aishwarya specializes in literary criticism, cultural commentary, and long-form features that explore the complex intersection of identity, politics, and social change.

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