Iranian born Shahrnush Parsipur to receive honorary degree at Brown along Nelson Mandela and Morgan Freeman
Brown University will confer honorary degrees on Iranian born author Shahrnush Parsipur, and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela and six other distinguished candidates during its 242nd Commencement exercises, Sunday, May 30, 2010.
Parsipur is a frank proponent of women’s rights, Iranian-born novelist Shahrnush Parsipur has seen all of her books banned in her native land and has been imprisoned for her writings four times, once for nearly five years.
Parsipur’s writing career began in 1974 with the publication of her first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter, in which a tradition-bound young woman encounters the revolutionary activism of her brother and his friends. Parsipur’s later works, such as Touba and the Meaning of the Night (1989) and Women Without Men (1989), explore the condition of women in Iran. A bestseller in Iran, Touba, like many of Parsipur's books, remains banned. In all, she has written 11 works of fiction and memoir. Translations of Parsipur’s stories appear in Stories by Iranian Women since the Revolution (1991) and Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology (1991).
Imprisoned by both the Shah’s security agency and the Islamic Republic in turn, the author now lives in exile in California. Parsipur was the first recipient of the International Writers Project Fellowship from Brown University in 2003-04. She also has received a Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammett Award from the Fund for Free Expression.
Parsipur's "women without Men" was turned to an award-winning movie by Shirin Neshat and is currently screening in North America (for a list click here). For Parsipur related events on Kodoom.com click here.
The other six candidates for honorary degrees at Brown include academy-award winner actor Morgan Freeman, computer scientist Barbara Liskov, civic leader Cecile Richards, reporter David Rohde, historian Romila Thapar, and historian Gordon S. Wood.
»This is a summary of the original feature in Farsi. To request a more extensive translation of the Farsi text, please contact us.