Nasrin Parvaz Books

Nasrin Parvaz was born in Tehran. In post-revolutionary Iran she became a women’s and civil rights activist. She was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1982. Her sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment and she was actually released in 1990.
After her release, Nasrin resumed her activities and once again she found herself being followed by Islamic guards. Some of her friends were re-arrested and she realised she could no longer stay in Iran and she fled here to England, where she claimed asylum in 1993. She was granted refugee status a year later, and has since lived in London. She 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.
 
Two of her books are available to buy on pre-order for a limited amount of time. Proceeds will be split with Nasrin and SolidariTee, with £2 of each sale being donated to SolidariTee. A set of both books is available for £12.
 
One Woman's Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir
Nasrin’s prison memoir was first published in Farsi in 2002. A summary of her memoir was published in Feminist Review (number 73) in 2003; and it was published in Italian in 2006 by Effedue Edizioni. This English version was published in 2018. 
 
In 1979, Nasrin Parvaz returned 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 23, 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.
 
Secret Letters from X to ANasrin Parvaz has written her experience and knowledge of Tehrans prison into this realistic historical fiction.
 
When Faraz accepts his uncle’s offer for a summer job converting one of Tehran’s prisons into a museum of the repressive rule of the Shah, he understands too late that this will mean destroying all evidence that the present regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has also tortured and executed prisoners there. Faraz realises there’s a way to redeem the situation. He finds love letters from Xavar, a prisoner during the regime, to her husband. Piecing together the letters he learns of the harsh life she endures and he cannot keep Xavar’s tragic history to himself – with dangerous consequences, in which past and present collide.