<strong>Azar Nafisi | VIWF Speakers Series</strong> | Vancouver

Azar Nafisi | VIWF Speakers Series | Vancouver | January 14

We get it. The Vancouver International Writers Festival came and went in a blink of an eye! It lasted only 6 days in October and now you're waiting again for another year to pass before you can mingle-it-up with fellow fans and writers, right? Well stop waiting and pull out your planners because the festival is chugging along into January with a diverse speakers series that surely won't disappoint.

Special guest will be bestselling Iranian author Azar Nafisi. She will be speaking about her most recent novel, Things I Have Been Silent About, a personal memoir that reflects on her family's experiences through many periods of change in Iran up until the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. (Note: Nafisi's most recent book has been available since 30 December 2008.)

I started making a list in my diary entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." Under it I wrote: "Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran." I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined.

From Things I Have Been Silent About

Saturday, 17 January 2008 | 7:30 pm
Capilano Performing Arts Theatre
2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver
Free

Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution. A girl's pain over family secrets; a young woman's discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval-these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and "reminds us of why we read in the first place" (Newsday).

From Random House:

Azar Nafisi is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In the 1970s she won a fellowship from Oxford and went on to teach English literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai University in Iran. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil and left Iran for America in 1997. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, has appeared on countless radio and television programs, and is the author of Things I've Been Silent About, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.