One Woman's Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir by Nasrin Parvaz

Description

One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir by Nasrin Parvaz

In 1979, Nasrin Parvaz returned home to Iran from England, where she had been studying, and became a member of a socialist party in Iran fighting for a non-Islamic state in which women had the same rights as men. Three years later, at the age of twenty-three, she was betrayed by a comrade and arrested by the regime’s secret police.

Nasrin spent the next eight years in Iran’s prison system. She was systematically tortured, threatened with execution, starved and forced to live in appalling, horribly overcrowded conditions. One Woman’s Struggle is both an account of what happened to her during those eight years and evidence that her spirit was never broken. Nasrin’s memoir is a story of friendship and mutual support, of how women drew strength from one another and found endless small ways to show kindness and even find tiny specks of joy.

This book, however, is not simply about the prison system in Iran. It is about oppression – and especially the oppression of women – wherever it takes place. It deserves to stand with Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man as an indictment of cruelty, brutality and the dehumanizing of fellow human beings.

– Catriona Troth, author of Gift of the Raven and Ghost Town.

Nasrin Parvaz

Additional information

Weight	421 g
Dimensions	13.0 × 1.9 × 19.8 cm

The Author

Nasrin Parvaz became a civil rights activist when the Islamic regime took power in Iran. She was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1982. Her sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment and she was actually released after eight years, in 1990. After her release, Nasrin resumed her activities and once again she found herself being followed by Islamic guards. She realised she could no longer stay in Iran and she fled to England, where she claimed asylum in 1993. She was granted refugee status a year later, and has since lived in London.

Literary and Artistic Work:

Nasrin’s One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A prison memoir was published in Farsi in 2002, and it was published in Italian in 2006 by Effedue Edizioni. It is now being published by Victorina Press in English.
One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A prison memoir is now an Award-Winner in the Women’s Issues category of the 2019 International Book
Awards
Temptation, based on the true stories of a number of male prisoners who survived the 1988 massacre of Iranian prisoners, was published in Farsi in 2008.
Nasrin’s poems and short stories are published in a number of different anthologies, such as: Write to be Counted, Resistance Anthology 2017; Over Land, Over Sea, Poems for those Seeking Refuge, published by Five Leaves in 2015. Her poems are published in Live Encounters Magazine.
One of Nasrin’s short stories, ‘The Time of Assassinations’, was chosen as one of the highly-commended entries in the anthology Words And Women: Four published by Unthank Books.
Another of Nasrin’s short stories, ‘A war Against Womanhood’, won the Women’s World Award in 2003.
In 2010 one of her short stories was longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and another shortlisted for the Asham Award.

Since 2005, together with poet Hubert Moore, Nasrin has translated a number of poems, prohibited in Iran, from Farsi into English. They appear in the Modern Poetry in Translation series.

Nasrin is the guest artist of Our Lives, May 1st – 8th 2018 Exhibition of Art by Foreign National Prisoners. Her paintings were accepted for inclusion in the exhibition’s calendar and for postcards. Nasrin’s stories have been published in Exiled Writers Ink magazine. Her article, ‘Writing in the ‘Host’ Language’, published in The Great Flight, MPT 2016 Number 1.

Nasrin has given talks on the violation of human rights in Iran, both in Farsi and in English, in a number of countries including Canada, Sweden, the UK and Italy. She talked at Leicester Secular Society (2018), Exiled Writers Ink, (2018), Bare Lit Festival (2016 and 2017), Southbank Centre (2015 and 2016), and for organizations such as Amnesty International, Cambridge PEN, the Medical Foundation, Saturday Forensic Forum (2013), Ledbury Poetry Festival and Eloquent Protest (2008). Nasrin’s stories were read at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Nasrin studied for a degree in psychology and subsequently gained an MA in International Relations at Middlesex University. She then completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Systemic Theory at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, where she worked in a team of family therapists.

http://nasrinparvaz.org/

Nasrin created many pieces of artwork once she was released from the Iranian prison. One of her pieces, ‘Displaced’, was shortlisted for the 2018 John Bird Prize – Open Competition at the Fishslab Gallery.

https://fishslabgallery.co.uk/john-bird-competition-now-open/

1 review for One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir by Nasrin Parvaz

David Wagoner – February 2, 2019
Some things have to b e said. Some books have to be written. Draw back the curtain on human rights. Nasrin takes you into the deepest darkest holes,where no light reaches, but where human rights are ripped away and the brave fight to give the world the greatest gift.

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