Lire Lolita à Téhéran

by Azar Nafisi

Pour avoir refusé de porter le voile, Azar Nafisi doit quitter l’université de Téhéran. Elle décide alors de réunir sept de ses étudiantes pour des cours clandestins dans l’intimité de son salon. Qu’elles soient conservatrices ou progressistes, croyantes ou laïques, elles vont débattre avec Lolita, Gatsby le Magnifique, Orgueil et Préjugés… Elles découvrent le pouvoir de la fiction et ses répercussions sur leur vie personnelle : l’imagination comme arme de résistance et gage de liberté. D’une richesse infinie, parfois drôle et souvent héroïque, Lire Lolita à Téhéran nous montre le quotidien de ces femmes au cœur de la République islamique. Vibrant, déchirant et inoubliable.

504 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 5, 2026

About the author

Azar Nafisi (Persian: آذر نفیسی) is an Iranian American writer and scholar of English literature whose work explores the political and imaginative power of books. Born in Tehran, she grew up in a family deeply engaged in public life. Her father served as mayor of the city in the early 1960s, while her mother was among the first women elected to the National Consultative Assembly. As a teenager, she left Iran to study in England and later Switzerland, eventually completing her university education in the United States. She earned a doctorate in English and American literature from the University of Oklahoma before returning to Iran shortly before the 1979 Revolution.
Nafisi began teaching at the University of Tehran, but her refusal to comply with mandatory veiling laws led to her expulsion in 1981. After a period of political and cultural uncertainty, she resumed teaching at Allameh Tabataba’i University. Her relationship with the institution remained fraught, and by the mid 1990s she had distanced herself from formal academic life. From 1995 to 1997, she held weekly literary discussions in her home for a group of female students, creating an intimate space where they read and interpreted novels considered unwelcome by the authorities. These meetings became the foundation for her most influential book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir that intertwines literature, personal reflection, and the lived realities of women in post-revolutionary Iran.
Nafisi moved to the United States in 1997 and later became a citizen. Her subsequent work continued to explore the role of books in shaping identity, imagination, and civic life. She has written widely for major newspapers and literary outlets and has held academic and public-intellectual roles at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Oxford. Her books include Things I’ve Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination, That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile, and Read Dangerously, each extending her conviction that literature offers a unique form of moral and imaginative resistance.
Her writing has received significant critical acclaim, earning awards for both literary merit and intellectual courage. In 2024, Reading Lolita in Tehran was adapted for film with Golshifteh Farahani portraying Nafisi. Throughout her career, she has spoken and written about the intersections of culture, authoritarianism, and personal freedom, insisting on the enduring relevance of literature in societies confronting political pressure. Her work continues to spark debate, admiration, and reflection across a wide international readership.