When in 1989 Shahrnush Parsipur published Women Without Men, a magical realist novella challenging the sexual and social repressions of women in Iran, she had already spent nearly five years in an Islamic Republic prison. The authorities banned the book, but copies passed privately between Iranian readers and, over decades, it travelled around the world, surviving censorship and its author’s further imprisonment and exile.
What made it such a powerful and deeply subversive work, and Parsipur, who has died aged 80, one of post-revolutionary Iran’s most vital literary voices, was its feminist take on women’s right to autonomy over their own bodies, particularly under the Islamic Republic’s gender apartheid regime.
