Nasrin Parvaz: Biography

Nasrin Parvaz was born in February 1958 in Tehran. She first came to the UK in 1978, at the age of 20, to study. When the revolution broke out the following year, she returned for a brief visit to her family little realising that it would be 15 years before she would come to Britain again as an exile. In post-revolutionary Iran she became active in the field of women’s rights and civil rights, as a result of which she was arrested in 1982. She was tortured and sentenced to execution. Her life was saved through the intervention of her father, who managed to get her sentence commuted to imprisonment. She was released in 1990 after spending eight years in prison.

After her release, she continued to see people who were organising themselves to fight for their rights. She found herself constantly followed by the revolutionary guards and some of her friends were arrested again. She realised that she could no longer stay in Iran and in 1993 she fled to UK and claimed asylum. She was granted refugee status a year later.

In London, she studied for a psychology degree, after which she did a Masters degree in International Relations.

The deleterious effect of torture and imprisonment led her to seek help from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, where she received psychotherapy for a number of years. This and writing enabled her to begin gradually rebuilding her life. After some initial attempts in Farsi, Nasrin began to write about her prison experience in English with the support and encouragement of British writer Sonja Linden as part of a testimonial writing project at the Medical Foundation. Out of this emerged her book Zire Boteh Laleh Abasi, the Farsi version of which was published in March 2002. Nasrin’s love of writing continues and she is currently working on a series of short stories based on her life in Iran and Britain.

Nasrin’s memoir was published in Italian in summer 2006 by Effedue Edizioni. She is currently working on a book in English based on her memoir.