I’m Writing You from Tehran

Delphine Minoui

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Suffering the recent loss of her beloved grandfather and newly committed to a career in journalism, Delphine Minoui decided to visit Iran in 1998 for the first time since the revolution—since she was four years old. She would stay for ten years, and I’m Writing You from Tehran tells her story.

In the course of that decade, great change comes to both writer and country, often at the same time. Minoui settles into daily life—getting to know her devout grandmother for the first time, making friends with local women who help her escape secret dance parties when the morality police arrive, figuring out how to be a journalist in a country that is suspicious of the press and Westerners. Once she finally starts to learn Persian, she begins to see Iran through her grandfather’s eyes. And so it is all the more crushing when the political situation falters. She is caught up in protests and interrogated by secret police; some friends disappear and others may be tracking her movements. She finds love, loses her press credentials, marries, and is separated from her husband by erupting global conflict. Through it all, her love for this place and its people deepens and she discovers in her family’s past a mission that will shape her entire future.

Delphine Minoui, a recipient of the Albert Londres Prize for her reporting on Iraq and Iran, is a Middle East correspondent for Le Figaro. Born in Paris in 1974 to a French mother and an Iranian father, she now lives in Istanbul.

Emma Ramadan lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is a co-owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, an NEA fellowship, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Previous translations include the genderless novel Sphinx by Anne Garréta.

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